Black ink serif lettering on the inside of a forearm reads for a minute there I lost myself, with a small coloured tattoo just visible at the elbow.

Quote lettering along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a single line of black serif lettering running along the inner forearm, reading for a minute there I lost myself. The letters are crisp and evenly spaced, with solid black ink and no shading. A small coloured tattoo is partly visible at the bottom edge of the frame, and the background is an office with binders and shelving.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the bindery ledger the way other men kept dogs, feeding it every evening and never quite trusting it. The abbey had bought a Stanhope press from a bankrupt printer in Leeds, and the type came in a wooden case, each letter a little sharp at the shoulder, so that the words I set looked as though they had been argued over. I was put to the case that winter because my hands were steady and my Latin was poor.

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The trouble began with the proof for the parish psalter. In the bottom tray I found a sort that belonged to no font we owned, a lower-case f with a hook cut at the top. I set it into a line of my own, not meaning anything by it, and when I pulled the sheet under the lamp the line read: for a minute there I lost myself. I stood a long while with the paper damp in my hand. Nobody had written it. I had only pieced it together from the drawer.

I did not tell the abbot. I locked the tray, ran the press at dawn, and burned the spoiled sheet in the kitchen range. But every night after Vespers I went down to the cellar and found the same hooked f waiting on the stone, and each time I sat with it a minute longer than I should, until the bell called me up and I could not recall which psalm I had been meant to be saying.

When the abbot gave the press to a younger brother at Lady Day, I was sent out to the water meadows to lift turnips. On the first morning I found the hooked f pushed into the mud beside the sluice gate, as though someone had dropped it there on purpose. I put it in my pocket and walked the length of the dyke with it, counting my steps, and for the first time since Candlemas I knew exactly where I was.