Black and grey photo of the inner forearm with the words Here I stand. in a typewriter style font, set against a pale, soft-focus background.

Here I stand lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a forearm with the phrase Here I stand. tattooed in a serif typewriter style font, with a full stop at the end. The lettering is crisp, dark and evenly spaced, with the ink sitting on the skin in a single line. The soft grey tones and pale fabric behind the arm give the image a muted, monochrome feel, with the text centred in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Text Phrase Quote Typewriter font

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 machine had lost its ribbon twice that winter, so Maud Pellow inked the keys by hand with a rag dipped in oil and cursed the Admiralty for every letter that came out grey. The letters were always the same kind: a widow on the far side of Skerrin asking after her pension, a crofter wanting to know whether the boat would run before the gales, a solicitor on the mainland asking why the ferry company had gone quiet. Maud answered them all on the same heavy paper, in capitals when she was cross and in lowercase when she was not.

Keep reading

Then the letter came that asked her to leave. The company would pay for a passage to Oban, a room in a boarding house, a place behind a dry-goods counter where nobody knew her name or her father's. She read it twice at the kitchen table while the kettle went cold. Outside, the water was the colour of pewter and the rock at the harbour mouth was showing its teeth.

She rolled a fresh sheet into the platen, set the margin, and typed her reply with the two fingers that never tired. Her hands did not shake. She struck each key slowly so every letter sat clean on the page, and when she reached the end she did not write the usual yours faithfully. She typed three words, then a full stop pressed so hard the paper dented.

The boat went out in the morning without her. The mainland office filed the reply under correspondence and forgot it by the spring. On Skerrin, though, the widow read it aloud at the shop, the crofter pinned a copy above his door, and Maud went on answering letters at the same table, the ink still grey.