Black typewriter-style lettering reading I contain multitudes on the inner wrist, photographed with the palm facing up in bright light.

I contain multitudes quote on wrist

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown palm up, with the inner wrist in focus. The tattoo is two lines of black lettering in a typewriter-style serif font, reading I contain multitudes. The ink is solid and even, and the photo is taken in harsh sunlight that casts shadows across the palm.

Lettering Hand Quote Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Dunning came in every Tuesday with a shoebox of unanswered letters and a fountain pen that leaked, and every Tuesday Edith Vane sat at the Imperial typewriter in the back of the stationer's on Harbour Row and typed whatever the customer couldn't. Most people wanted a condolence or a complaint about the bins. Mrs Dunning wanted to tell her son in Perth that the hens were laying again.

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Some weeks Edith typed the hens. Some weeks she typed the son, who wrote back in a hand that slanted like rain, and then she answered him as a man of sixty who had never left the county, and then as a girl of nine who had once kept a snail in a teacup. Nobody on Harbour Row noticed. The letters went out stamped and sealed, and the replies came back addressed to Mrs Dunning, who read them aloud at the counter with her glasses on her nose and never once asked who had written them.

In October the Imperial jammed on the capital I. Edith cleaned the arm with a sliver of cork and a drop of paraffin, and while it dried she typed a line on a spare card to test the ribbon, the way she always did: I contain multitudes, in the same flat capitals the machine had always given her. Then, because the ribbon was running low, she typed it again in lower case. It looked like a stranger's handwriting. It looked, she thought, like someone who had been waiting to be asked.

Mrs Dunning came on the Tuesday and collected her letter. Folded inside it was a card with a single line Edith had not dictated. She had meant to drop it in the bin with the spent ribbon ends. Mrs Dunning read it twice, folded it into her coat pocket, and said nothing, which was the first time in eleven years anyone had let Edith keep a secret.