Close-up of the word fernweh in black typewriter-style lettering across the inner wrist, with a hand holding the wrist from below against a knitted blanket.

Fernweh lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the word fernweh tattooed across the inside of a wrist in black, serif typewriter-style lettering. The letters are solid with even weight and a slightly soft edge, and the ink reads as dark grey to black on light skin. A hand holds the wrist from below, and the background is a knitted blanket in orange, brown and cream.

Lettering Forearm Word Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbon on the Imperial had gone the colour of weak tea, so Mrs Maddock held each key down twice and hoped the sorting office in Lerwick would forgive the smudges. She was typing the word for the fourth time that morning, because the first three attempts had gone into the stove. Fernweh, she tapped out, letter by letter. Her late husband had taught her the German from a dictionary with a cracked spine. It meant a longing for far-off places, he had said, and she had laughed and told him it was a word for people who had never had to haul a cart through a gale.

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Her son Tom stood at the back door with his kit bag, watching the rain come sideways over the harbour wall. The mainland boat left at nine. He had promised to write, and she had said she would believe it when a stamp came through the letterbox in his own hand.

She rolled the card out and read it. The letters had come out faint and even, the way the old keys always did when the ribbon was nearly spent. She thought they looked like words going quiet, and that would not do. So she struck the platen harder, until the e's bit through the card, and folded it into his coat without a word.

He read it on the quay and laughed, then folded it smaller. Years later, in a boarding house in Bergen, he unfolded it again and found the letters had printed backwards on the reverse, a faint mirror of the word, pressed through the card the way she had pressed it.