Three black letters N, Q and R, each set in a yellow circle, run down the outer forearm of a person wearing a green patterned dress and tan leather bracelets.

Letters N, Q and R on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three capital letters, N, Q and R, are stacked vertically on the outer forearm, each inside a solid yellow-orange circle. The letters are set in a simple black sans-serif style with clean, even linework. The plain white background and the green patterned dress and tan bracelets sit around the arm, which fills the right side of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret had been setting the crossword at the Hartlepool Mercury for thirty-one years, and in all that time the three letters in the bottom corner of the grid had never once been allowed to touch. N sat in the middle row like a man waiting for a bus, Q was a crooked thing nobody wanted near a vowel, and R was always the one bumped out to make room for somebody else's word. The editor, Dennis Pry, insisted the rule came from the old typesetters, who kept the awkward letters in separate drawers so they wouldn't jam the press.

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On the Friday before she retired, she found the lead type for those drawers still in the back room, cold and heavy, smelling of machine oil. She carried N, Q and R out in her cardigan pocket and laid them on the desk in a column, the way the compositors used to stack proofs when they argued about a comma. Nobody had asked her to. The grid was already filled and the printers were waiting, so she left the three of them on the blotter and went home for her tea.

Monday's crossword ran as normal, except for a small square in the margin where three clues had been given no answers at all. Readers wrote in for a week. Dennis kept the letters in a biscuit tin on his shelf, and every Friday after that the paper carried a new puzzle with its own odd corner and a note, unsigned, that said only: Keep them in order.

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