Before and after photos of a forearm lettering cover-up: black script lyrics on the left, and on the right a coloured tattoo of lined notebook paper showing the corrected wording.

Lettering cover-up and fix-up on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The top panel shows black script lettering on a forearm reading a short set of lyrics, with a spelling error annotated in the lines. The lower panel shows a coloured redesign drawn as a sheet of lined notebook paper with red marks crossing out and correcting the words, shaded in blue, brown and red. The composition is a stacked before and after comparison with overlaid labels.

Lettering Forearm Script Lyric Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheet arrived folded into quarters, damp at one corner, with a note pinned to it in careful capitals: MR OSEI'S WORDS FOR THE BAZAAR SONGBOOK, PLEASE MAKE THEM RIGHT. Dilys Haworth unfolded it under the shop lamp and saw the trouble at once. The lines were written on a page torn from a school exercise book, and in the second line someone had spelt the wrong word. Through, it said, where the sense plainly needed though. A previous proofreader had scratched a red arrow above it and given up.

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She had worked the presses at Aldgate Print for thirty-one years and knew the difference between a typo and a choice. A typo sat wrong on the page. This one sat wrong on purpose, or at least it had been written by a man who wrote his pencil lines fast and trusted his ear. She read it aloud, quietly, the way she read everything before it went to plate. Although blood pumping through my veins keeps me from dying. It was the kind of thing a man sang to himself on the late bus after a double shift at the depot, and it deserved to be set straight.

So she fixed it. She wrote Although above the bad word in red, drew the arrows, crossed out the second Through and marked the sheet for the typesetter with a note of her own. Then she sat with the pen capped for a long while, because the committee had asked for clean copy and clean copy was what she had given them. Nobody would ever know the sheet had come in wrong.

She kept the original anyway, with her corrections bleeding into the blue ruled lines, and filed it in the drawer marked M. Music, she thought, was the word he had wanted most, and it was the one nobody had needed to correct.