Black script lettering reading 'Write drunk; edit sober' inside a partial ink circle, with a smaller line of text below, on the side of a torso above a waistband.

Quote in a broken circle on the torso

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black script quote, 'Write drunk; edit sober', sits inside a partly drawn circle that fades into dotted strokes at the top right. A smaller line of lettering appears below the circle. The linework is bold and uniform, with soft grey shading in the circle, and the design is shown in close view on bare skin above clothing.

Lettering Other Script Quote Circle Handwriting Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third page of the Kettering Courier went to press with a sentence that should never have survived, and Dennis Oakes only noticed it at six the next morning, when the bundles were already loaded on the lorry. "The council wept over the bypass vote." He had typed it at eleven the night before, with a half-pint of bitter going warm at his elbow and the keys sticking under his fingers. Drunk, the line had sung.

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Sober, he read it in the dim back office while the presses thumped through the floorboards, and he laughed until he had to sit down on the radiator. Mrs Gorrell from the planning committee would ring by nine. He could already hear the weary patience in her voice. He fished the spoiled copy out of the wastepaper basket, flattened it on the desk and worked over it with a red biro: "wept" struck through, "voted" above it, then "sighed", then nothing at all, just a line of ink where a flourish had been.

The corrected version ran the next Thursday, dull as gravel, and nobody wrote in about it. Dennis kept the original folded in his wallet, soft at the creases now, and when the young reporters asked him for the secret of the trade he would take it out and show them the wept council, then hand it back without comment. The trick, he thought, was never the drinking. It was knowing which of your sentences had to be taken back the next morning, and having the nerve to take them.