Black lettering reading Insert Coins In Slot with a small red arrow and black flourishes above it, on a person's lower back above jeans.

Insert Coins In Slot lettering on lower back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a line of black serif lettering reading Insert Coins In Slot, with a red downward arrow and black decorative flourishes above the words. It sits on the lower back, with the top of the buttocks and the waistband of dark jeans visible below it. The lettering is solid black with clean edges, and the red arrow is the only colour, so the piece reads as mostly black ink with a single accent.

Lettering Back Lettering Text Arrow Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the brass, boy, it bites. That machine by the lamp has swallowed more sixpences than the bank at Crewe, and it has never once given a ticket back without being asked twice. Sit yourself on that bench where the paint's still tacky and I'll tell you how it came by its red arrow.

Keep reading

Ada Pruett stood where you're sitting in the winter of 1931, with two shillings and fourpence in her glove and a sailor's letter in her coat. The letter said Ludlow, the four-ten, and no later. She fed the slot a shilling and the machine chewed it and spat nothing back. She tried again. She pushed in her buttons, a bent hairpin, the last of her pennies, and the little brass arrow above the window stayed fixed on the slot as if it were waiting for her to notice what it wanted. Old Mr Oakes came out with his lamp and said the machine only ever took what was owed to it, and nobody had yet told it the fare had gone up.

Ada stopped feeding it. She looked at that arrow a long while, then at the clock, which said four-oh-six, and understood the arrow had never been pointing at the machine at all. It pointed at the coin she had been hoarding in her fist, the one she would not let go of in case the train went without her. She dropped it in, heard it land, and the ticket came out warm and crooked into the tray. The four-ten pulled in four minutes late. The sailor was on the step with no ticket either, only a grin and the same bent hairpin in his cap.

I've watched that machine forty years and it still takes my pennies. Every so often a ticket comes out with nobody to claim it, and I keep those in the drawer under the signal book. Go on, put your coin in. The arrow knows where it's going, even if you don't.