Black lettering tattoo of a phonetic transcription in square brackets, running across a forearm in a Lettering style.

Phonetic script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black tattoo of a phonetic transcription enclosed in square brackets runs across the forearm, printed upside down from the camera's viewpoint. The lettering uses a clean, even sans-serif typeface with crisp edges and solid black ink. The forearm fills the left of the frame, with a white top and a patterned skirt at the right and a plain bed in the background.

Lettering Forearm Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The proof came back to the bench with a pencil mark beside the entry, and Edwin Crane knew before he read it that Mrs Ada Fenn had been at it again. She had taught elocution at the Mechanics' Institute for thirty years and believed a dictionary was a sickroom where words were kept alive by careful nursing. Brackets, she had written in the margin. The sound is not the spelling. Put it in brackets, so the reader knows to listen.

Keep reading

Edwin set the line by hand, letter by letter from the case, and filed the stress mark down twice before it sat right. The word belonged to a fishing village on the Norfolk coast that Ada had visited once as a girl, and to a grandmother nobody had seen since. Ada had given him the transcription on a card. He did not ask what it meant. A compositor learns that meaning is the customer's business and the spacing is his.

When the forme was locked up on the Thursday, Ada came in with her gloves still on and asked him to read it aloud. He tried. The vowel came out too flat, and she laughed, corrected him, and made him do it again until the brackets seemed to open in his mouth like a door. Then she folded the card into her purse and said the trick was never in the letters. It was in agreeing to say a thing the same way twice.

The book came out the next spring with the entry on page 412, squeezed between a word for a kind of cloth and a word for mercy. Ada bought six copies and posted one to the village with the bracketed word unchanged. Edwin kept the galley proof, and even now he says the sound under his breath while he waits for the kettle, careful with the stress, the way he was taught.