Two panels show black lettering tattoos on a forearm: "heart" over "mind" above, and "courage" over "fear" below, in a typewriter-style font.

Heart over mind and courage over fear lettering on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The top panel shows the words "heart" and "mind" stacked on the inner forearm, and the lower panel shows "courage" and "fear" in the same arrangement, with the leading letters of "courage" cut off at the left edge. Each word is set in a solid, typewriter-style serif with a thin rule between the pairs, rendered in black ink with no shading or colour. The arm rests against a dark knitted sleeve on a plain, soft-focus background.

Lettering Forearm Heart Courage Fear Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The typewriter came up the valley road in the back of a carrier's cart, wrapped in a horse blanket, and the carrier would not say where it had been. The schoolmistress, Ada Penrose, paid him four shillings and carried it home herself. Nobody in Harrow Cross had seen a machine that drew a thin rule under every pair of words, so when she typed her first page the men at the well came up the lane to look.

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The page said heart above mind, with the line between them and the word mind set beneath. The men laughed and said it was the wrong way round, that a sensible town put the mind first. Ada only shrugged and fed the next sheet in. She typed courage over fear for the widow at the end of the lane, who had kept her door shut since the dust storm took her husband's cattle. The widow read it, folded it small, and went out into the road with a bucket for the first time in a month.

The trouble came when the carrier returned in autumn wanting his machine back. He said it had been taken from a dead man's wagon, and that it wrote what the dead man had wanted written. Ada asked him what the dead man had wanted. He could not remember, the road was long, and the dust was rising behind him. She gave him four shillings for his trouble and kept the typewriter.

That night she typed one more line, just to see. Heart, then the rule, then mind. Under it she left the lower word blank and sat in the lamplight listening to the wind pick at the shutters. In the morning the blank had been filled in, in her own neat capitals, and the word was home.