Two inner wrists side by side in black and white, with the word past in black serif lettering on the left wrist and future on the right.

Past and future wrist lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are held side by side, each carrying a single word in black ink. The word past sits on the left wrist and future on the right, both in a small serif typeface with fine, even strokes. The photograph is black and white, with a plain background that keeps the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Forearm Word Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Mind the furniture, Dilly, it bites." Mr Quayle said it every morning for the first month, and I took it for a joke about the heavy iron frames until the day my thumb found the gap between two lines of lead and I understood he meant the words themselves.

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He kept two sorts in the drawer under the composing stone, one stamped past and one stamped future, both cut in the same small serif that the bakery downstairs used on its loaf labels. Nobody ordered them. They were spares, he said, the way a man keeps two keys to a house he means to leave. When I asked which one went first on a page, he only tapped the drawer and said the printer decides that, not the type.

The shop closed in the spring. The last job was a funeral card for the woman who had run the bakery for forty years, and her daughters asked for two lines beneath her name. Mr Quayle set them himself, his hands slow, and let me pull the proof. Past he had set on the left. Future on the right. The ink was still tacky when he lifted the sheet to the lamp, and he read it twice, then folded it into his coat pocket without saying which of us it was for.