Black lettering tattoo of the phrase Stuff your eyes with wonder in a typewriter-style font on the upper back.

Quote reading Stuff your eyes with wonder

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a line of text tattooed across the upper back, reading Stuff your eyes with wonder with a full stop at the end. The letters use a typewriter-style serif with slightly uneven, inked edges, set on two staggered lines with the second line sitting lower and to the right. The warm, yellow-toned photo has a faded vignette border, and the ink appears dark and greyish against the skin.

Lettering Back Text Quote Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guesthouse on Ness had a typewriter nobody was allowed to touch, so I learned the keys by copying the menu cards onto the backs of tide tables. Mrs Quayle, who ran the place with a ledger and a wooden spoon, caught me at it on the third morning and didn't scold. She pulled a sheet from the drawer, rolled it in, and told me to type whatever I'd been staring at out of the window. I typed that the gulls were arguing about the bins again. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the stairs.

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That summer I wrote everything down. Fog that lifted like a sheet off a bed, the ferryman who whistled only in minor keys, the lighthouse keeper's dog who waited at the jetty for a man who drowned in 1961. Mrs Quayle would read each page over her spectacles and mark it with a red pencil, never more than one word. Once, beside a long sentence about the herring boats, she wrote the word wonder and underlined it twice. I asked what she meant. She said I kept looking at things as though they might be taken away, and that I should stuff my eyes with it while I had the chance, like a sailor filling his pockets before a storm.

I left Ness in September with a suitcase, a bad cold and a battered Olivetti she gave me without a word of explanation. The hardest thing to carry home was her handwriting on the last page, the word wonder in the margin, the line she'd never typed but had kept for me. Years later, when I finally had the nerve to have it marked on my skin, I chose the typeface that matched that old machine and let the staggered second line fall where my breath would have fallen.