Black serif lettering reading in, teg, ri and ty separated by dots, tattooed along a forearm, with a gloved hand visible at the bottom of the frame.

Integrity lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word integrity in black serif capitals and lowercase, split into syllables by small dots and an accent mark over the e in teg. The letters are solid, even black ink with clean edges and no shading, set in a single horizontal line across the forearm. The skin around the lettering is pale with some redness, and a gloved hand appears at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Word Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oakley liked his proofs read aloud, so the whole back shop at Carrick and Vine heard me say the word twice before I had my pencil on it. "In-teg-ri-ty," I read, and he tapped the galley with a nicotine finger. "Where's the stress?" I didn't know. Nobody had told me that a dictionary keeps its little marks the way a bank keeps its ledgers, or that the accent over the e was a promise the printer had to keep.

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That week the firm was setting the council's annual report, nine hundred pages of dull figures, and the word turned up in the chairman's foreword, and again in the heading. Oakley made me reset the heading three times. Each time I sorted the letters by hand from the case, and each time the dots between the syllables came out a little crooked. He said a crooked dot made a man look as if he'd been drinking. I thought he was being fussy until the fourth attempt, when I stopped watching the clock and simply set it right, every letter square on its feet.

The report went to press on a Thursday. Nobody thanked me. Years later I saw a printed copy in a library in Leeds, and the chairman's foreword was still there, the word split neatly into its four clean pieces, the accent sitting over the e like a small, stubborn flag. I stood in the reference section for longer than was polite, reading it under my breath, getting the stress right this time.