"i am, i am, i am" lettering on a forearm
Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A photograph of a single line of black serif lettering reading "i am, i am, i am." across the inner forearm. The letters are crisp, with even solid ink and no shading, and the line sits slightly angled across the arm. The maroon sleeve and pale skin frame the text against a plain background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mr Gorse kept the type in a wooden case of two hundred and six boxes, and he would not let me touch the lowercase until my hands stopped shaking. Lead sorts, backwards, cold as coins. I learned to read them upside down before I could read the newspaper the right way up. That winter the shop on Anlaby Road was busy with funeral cards and handbills for the Co-operative, and the gas kept dropping so that the press ran slow and the ink went grey at the edges.
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On a Thursday a woman came in with a card she had written herself, folded twice in a handkerchief. She wanted it set in the old face, the one with feet on its letters, and she wanted the line to say nothing but the words she had written. I set it for her, letter by letter, my stick in my left hand: i am, i am, i am. I asked whether she had meant to repeat it. She said she had meant it every time.
I put the card through the press twice, the second time to be sure the comma sat clean. She paid in coppers and took the proofs. Three weeks later Mr Gorse found a single sheet left in the drawer under the furniture, unpaid for, with the same line on it and a small smear where someone had pressed a thumb. He never told me what it meant. He only took the sort for the second i out of the case and kept it in his waistcoat pocket, where it stayed until the day he died.
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