Black lettering reading Insert Coins In Slot with a small red arrow and scrollwork above it, tattooed on the lower back above jeans.

Insert Coins In Slot lettering on lower back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a line of black serif-style lettering reading Insert Coins In Slot, with a small red downward arrow and black scrolled flourishes above the words. The text is crisp and evenly weighted, with solid black ink and a flat red fill on the arrow. The photo is taken straight on, with the tattoo centred on bare lower back skin above the waistband of dark jeans.

Lettering Back Text Arrow Flourish Coin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the machine on the quay, my dears, for it has opinions. It came off the mainland ferry the spring the lighthouse went dark, a squat iron box with a glass face and a brass lever, and across its front in careful black letters it said exactly what it wanted: Insert Coins In Slot. Above the words someone had painted a little red arrow, pointing down, as if we might otherwise have missed the hole.

Keep reading

Mairead Tully kept the chandlery and was the first to try it. She fed it a penny for a barley sugar, then a shilling for a sheet of paper, and the paper came out folded small and smelling of diesel, with a name written on it that she had not spoken aloud since her husband went under in the fog. Within a month half the island was feeding it. Coins went in and things came out: a lost glove, a letter from a cousin in Glasgow, the weather for Thursday, which was always right.

The price, the old men said, was always a coin. You paid what was owed, and the arrow kept count. So when young Declan Moy stood on the quay on the last autumn ferry, bag packed and his mother not speaking to him, he turned out his pockets and found one copper left. He pushed it in. The lever stuck. For a long breath nothing happened, and then the lamp came on above the harbour, though no one had mended it, and the machine gave out a single folded slip. It read: Come back and feed me.