Close photo of the word POWER tattooed on an inner forearm in distressed typewriter-style black lettering, with the O replaced by a teal female symbol.

POWER lettering with female symbol on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells the word POWER in distressed, typewriter-style letters with broken, speckled edges. The O is replaced by a female symbol outlined in teal, while the other letters are solid black. The lettering runs diagonally across the skin against a plain pale background.

Lettering Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tennant had been setting type since the ferry stopped running in January, and by the time the boat docked on Hallin her fingers smelled of lead and linseed. The print shop above the harbour was cold enough to see her breath. Her father had kept the press going for thirty years and never let a letter reach the paper with a chipped edge, but the bulletin for the cannery women needed one word more than the drawer could give her.

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The heavy face had run out of O's sometime in the spring. She went through the drawer of odd sorts, past the broken quoins and the brass rules gone green at the corners, until her thumb found the female symbol the old printer had ordered from Glasgow for a cooperative that never paid. It was a size too small and sat a fraction low in the forme. She locked it in anyway, inked the rollers, and when she pulled the first proof the circle came up speckled and uneven, as if damp had got into the metal the way it got into everything on the island.

The sheets went out before the tide turned. The headline ran across the top in black capitals, and the letter that was not an O printed in the teal ink she had mixed from the last of the cobalt and a pinch of blue, which she had been saving for something she could not name. The men at the pier read it with their hands in their pockets and said nothing.

Mags walked the copies up to the cannery gate herself and pinned one to the board beside the wage notices. By noon someone had torn it down and folded it into a pocket. By evening another stood in its place, and this time the wind had already started to lift the corner where the symbol was, as though it wanted to be read twice.