Black typewriter-style lettering reading life in every word across the upper back, with a hand resting on the shoulder.

Life in every word lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark shoulder-length hair, showing the phrase life in every word tattooed in black across the upper back. The letters are set in a bold typewriter-style typeface with uneven, inked edges, stacked on four lines. The background is pale skin and a soft grey-blue wall, with a hand with red-painted nails resting on the shoulder.

Lettering Back Quote Word Hair Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Remington had a sticky e, and Mr Hollis at the Carrow Valley Gazette would not pay for a new one until after the council meeting, so I typed around it. Every e in the obituaries came out a little blind, a little hungry, and the old men who read them over breakfast never once complained.

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I was seventeen that summer and had been put in the back room to learn the trade from Ada Pringle, who had sixty years of ink on her cuffs and no patience for adjectives. She said a reporter's job was to pin the facts down before they wandered off. 'Words are cheap,' she told me, pulling a sheet from the platen. 'It's the letters that cost you.'

Then the telegram came about the Ferris boy, lost on the reservoir road, and Ada sat at the machine with her hands flat on the keys for a full minute before she typed a single thing. When she started, she wrote slowly, and I watched each capital strike the paper like a dropped button. Her last line she typed twice, the second time pressing so hard the bar nearly jammed.

Life in every word, she said, and tore the sheet free. Then she gave one short laugh, like a cough, and told me to fetch the paste.