Small black fine line lettering reading F;GHT ON, with a semicolon in place of the I, on the inner forearm.

Fight on lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo on the inner forearm, reading F;GHT ON in black capital letters with a semicolon in place of the I. The sans-serif letterforms are thin, even and evenly spaced, drawn in solid black ink with no shading. The plain pale skin and soft bedding in the background keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Lettering Text Phrase Semicolon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The forme was locked on a Thursday, and by seven the I had gone missing from the type case. Mr Okafor, who ran the floor at the Calder Street works, swore the drawer had been full the week before. Someone had been pocketing sorts again, or the boy from the bindery had used the wrong tray. We had a headline to fit across the top of Friday's page about the mill strike, one letter short of a clean line, and no time to cast more lead.

Keep reading

I was nineteen and had been setting type for four months. I stood over the stone with my composing stick, turning a dozen spare sorts in my fingers, and it was Mrs Pell from the proofing desk who said, "Use the stop, love. A stop doesn't need a letter to make sense." So I took a semicolon from the punctuation box and dropped it into the gap where the I should have been. It sat there looking like a full stop with a tail, a sentence that had been interrupted halfway through, and I nearly pulled it out again.

The paper ran on Friday with F;GHT ON across the top in heavy type. The strike leaders read it at the gates and laughed, then stopped laughing and started nodding. Mrs Pell said the semicolon was the cleverest thing a printer had ever done by accident, because it told the reader the sentence wasn't finished and they had to carry on past it.

I still have that sort. It lives in a tobacco tin on my dresser, the lead worn smooth where my thumb used to rest. When somebody tells me a thing is over, I take it out and turn it in the light until they remember it isn't.