Black arrow tattoo on a forearm with the words endure and survive set along the shaft in typewriter lettering.

Endure and survive arrow on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black arrow runs diagonally across the inner forearm, with the words endure and survive written in a typewriter-style font along its shaft. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink for the arrowhead and fletching and simple outlines for the lettering. The image is shown in plain black ink on pale skin against a neutral background, with the arrow filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Arrow Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come sideways across the car park since seven, so by half nine the typewriters were the only things left on my trestle that nobody wanted to handle. Then Mr Halloran came under the gazebo with a black portable tucked under one arm and a carrier bag of old ribbons in the other, shaking water off his cap onto my stock. "The e won't stay down," he said. "Keeps lifting out of words, like it's given up."

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I set the machine on the trestle and turned the platen by hand. A sheet was still rolled in it, the carbon gone grey at the edges. Someone had typed ENDURE in capitals, then SURVIVE beneath it, and the second e had been struck through twice so hard the paper had torn. Halloran watched my fingers instead of the page. "My father's," he said. "He taught bowmanship on the grammar school field for thirty years. Used to tell the lads those two words were the same job done at different speeds."

I cleaned the e bar with a toothbrush and a drop of paraffin while he talked about the field, the wet grass, the straw butts patched with tape. The boy he remembered best had shot badly for a whole term and wanted to quit. His father had typed the words on the staff machine, pinned them above the butts, and told him an arrow only ever goes one direction, so you keep drawing until your arm learns it. The boy didn't quit. Halloran didn't say what became of him, and I didn't ask.

When the key finally clicked down clean, I fed in a fresh ribbon and typed ENDURE myself, slowly. Halloran paid in damp fives and left the old sheet behind on the trestle. I folded it into my coat where the rain couldn't reach it, and walked the length of the market with the two words held steady in my chest like a shaft on a drawn bow.