Black distressed typewriter-style lowercase alphabet with punctuation on a white background, shown as a flash sheet of lettering designs.

Distressed typewriter alphabet sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of lowercase letters a to z, plus an exclamation mark, ampersand, question mark and parentheses, set in a worn typewriter-style typeface. The letters are solid black with rough, speckled distress marks that break up the edges and add a grungy texture. The characters sit in a neat grid of six rows on a plain white background.

Lettering Alphabet Lettering Typewriter font Punctuation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Remington in the back room of the Gazette lost its e a fortnight before the strike, and Mr Okonedo, the sub-editor, said nobody would pay to fix a machine that could only remember half the alphabet. He sent us all back to pencils. I kept typing on it anyway. The worn keys still struck the paper with a speckled, bruised kind of mark, and I liked how each letter came out a little damaged, as if it had been through something.

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That Tuesday the telegraph from Halifax came in at a quarter to midnight, and the mill fire had to be in the morning edition. The a was sticking, the b was dropping ink, and the l kept jumping its line. I typed the copy in pieces, filling the gaps with question marks and parentheses, and the ampersand held firm when everything else gave way. Okonedo read it over my shoulder with his lamp tipped low and said it was the first news story he had ever seen written entirely in punctuation.

The next morning the paper ran with the headline in the old wooden type we kept for emergencies. Under it, in my own clumsy typing, was the line that mattered: Mill fire & no one hurt (thank God). The printers had left the gaps as they were, so the words read like a message from someone who had run out of breath.

I still have the machine's blotter. Pressed into the paper are the ghosts of every letter I typed that night, and the e is only a pale crescent where the key once was.