Black typewriter-style lettering reading one foot in the grave on a man's calf, with a prosthetic leg visible while he stands on an escalator.

"One foot in the grave" text tattoo on a calf

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a man standing on an escalator in khaki shorts and a grey top, seen from behind with his face out of frame. The tattoo is a line of black lettering in a typewriter-style font, reading one foot in the grave, set across the back of his calf. The image is in colour, but the ink and the background are muted greys and beiges, with a prosthetic leg visible on the left.

Lettering Other Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the portable's habits before you learn the canal's. The e sticks when damp gets into the platen, and the bell rings a half-beat late, so Mrs Okonedo, who kept the lock cottage at Hatton Wharf for thirty-one years, used to say she could hear the machine coming along the towpath before she saw the boat. She brought it to you in a carrier bag on a wet Tuesday in March, wrapped in a tea towel, and asked whether you could make it type one more letter before she went into hospital for the hip.

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You spend the evening on the cabin table with a tin of three-in-one oil, a cotton bud and a torch clamped between two mugs. The e frees on the third stroke. The letter is to the parish council, who want to know whether the churchyard wall will be repointed before the spring fete, and she dictates it from her chair by the stove with the patience of someone who has outlived three councils. At the end she tells you to put her sign-off in capitals, so you do. Under the pale wash of the lock lamp the keys clack in order, and the bell rings late, exactly as it should.

She reads the sheet twice, then folds it into thirds and taps the last line with one finger. ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE, it says, and under it, in smaller type you had to strike over twice, the word Yours.

By the time the council replies, the barge has gone down to Braunston with you at the tiller and her cat asleep on the coal bunker. You still keep the portable under the bunk, the e still sticks when it rains, and you still hear it, somewhere out on the water, a half-beat behind the rest of you.