Black typewriter-style lettering reading I write for fear of silence across the inner wrist of a light-skinned arm.

Quote in typewriter lettering on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a three-line quote, I write for fear of silence, tattooed in black typewriter-style lettering across the inner wrist. The letters are evenly spaced and crisp, with clean, solid black ink on pale skin. The hand is raised at the top of the frame and a dark plaid sleeve sits at the bottom, against a dim background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You carry the typewriter up from the cabin on a folded tea towel, because the keys stick if the boat rocks and the lock gates at Hatherley are slow to open. Your father calls it a useless lump of iron. Still, he listens for its clatter from the towpath, the way you listen for the tick of a cooling engine. Nobody on the barge talks much since Mother went ashore at Stourport, so you type instead. You type the names of the boats that pass, the weight of the coal, the way the willows bend when the wind comes off the weir. Each sheet gets read aloud to the heron on the lock beam, who never complains. By October the pile in the tin box under the bunk is taller than the kettle.

Keep reading

One afternoon Wilf from the next lock sits on the balance beam swinging his boots and asks why you bother, if nobody reads it. You tell him you write for fear of silence, because when the typewriter stops the boat goes so quiet you can hear the water working at the hull, patient as a thief. Wilf thinks about this for a long time. Then he says his gran keeps the wireless on all night for the same reason, and that she swears the voices know when she's dozing.

That evening you roll a fresh sheet into the platen and type the date, then the word Still, then the word Here. Your father comes up the steps with his cap in his hands and stands in the doorway without saying anything, which is how you know he has heard every line.

You strike the last key, and the clatter goes out across the flat water, loud enough to reach the far bank and come back.