Black typewriter-style lettering reading I'll be one tough act to follow runs along the inner forearm.

Quote lettering along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with a single line of text tattooed diagonally from the elbow towards the wrist. The words read I'll be one tough act to follow, set in a typewriter-style serif font in black ink. The skin is pale and the background shows white window blinds and a folded sheet of paper, with the text kept sharp and centred along the arm.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that, I know what you're thinking. Nobody sensible puts a sentence like that on a poster, not in a town where the rain sits on the big top like a wet dog. But Mr Albertine typed it on the old Imperial in the caravan, two fingers and a cup of cold tea going skinny beside him, and when I asked why he'd made a promise nobody could keep, he just tapped the carriage return and said a line on paper is a debt the paper has to pay.

Keep reading

That autumn the Wheeler Brothers had gone under in Doncaster, the lions were sold to a zoo in Kent, and the only thing we had left to sell was Ada Rourke on the high wire. She could cross Mill Lane in the dark with a candle balanced on her chin. We ran the bills through every market town between Hull and Lincoln, and the words sat there in plain black type under her name. I thought them a bit grand for a tent with a patched roof.

Opening night, eleven people came, and two of them were asleep. Ada climbed up in her grey cardigan, took off her shoes, and walked the wire the way you'd walk home from the shops, slow and not looking down. Halfway across, the wind caught the canvas and the whole tent groaned like a ship. She stopped, laughed out loud, and kept going. When she reached the far platform, the eleven of them stood and clapped as if the Albert Hall had turned up.

Afterwards Albertine sat on the caravan step with the bill in his lap, reading it by the lamp. 'Well,' he said, 'they weren't wrong.' He folded it in four and put it in his coat, and I've still got it, the corner gone soft. Every time I see that line I think of the typewriter's stiff little e, pressed so hard into the paper it went clean through.