Six-panel grid of arms with black serif lettering quotes, such as Alice felt dreadfully puzzled, tattooed on the forearms and upper arms.

Literary quotes in serif lettering on arms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A six-panel grid shows different people's arms, cropped below the face, each with a line or two of black serif text tattooed on the skin. The lettering is crisp and even, with the quotes running along the forearm or upper arm, and the skin tones and backgrounds are muted. The text is the only ink visible, so the colour is black and grey throughout.

Lettering Forearm Upper arm Text Quote Alice Serif Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothea Quayle had set type for thirty-one years at the Holloway Press, and she trusted a serif the way other women trusted a good wool coat. On the Thursday the proof of the new Penhallow edition came up from the stone, she ran her thumb along one sentence and found it wrong. The compositor had dropped a comma where a full stop should sit, and a capital had wandered out of line. Nobody else would notice. She noticed, and she could not stop noticing.

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She went back to the case with her tweezers and magnifier, lifting each sort from its partition as though it were a small animal that might bite. Her colleague Frank said she was being fussy and that readers would never mind. "The readers have already minded," she said. "They just haven't written in." Outside, rain came sideways over the canal, and the gas lamps along the towpath flickered on one by one, as they had every evening since her father's day.

By six she had reset the page twice. Frank went home. Dorothea stayed, the machine ticking as it cooled, and read the sentence aloud to the empty room, testing each stress against the letters in her palm. Then she understood what she had been correcting. The error was never the comma. She had let herself be hurried, the way the sentence hurried, and had forgotten how to be puzzled at all.

She left the comma crooked. She inked the forme, pulled the first sheet herself and held it up to the lamp, where the little mark sat exactly where a sensible person would never have put it.