Black and grey lettering tattoo reading "we're all mad here" in a typewriter-style font across the back of a person's neck, with dark hair falling beside it.

Quote tattoo across the back of the neck

Lettering · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a person's neck, with hair falling to one side. The tattoo is the phrase "we're all mad here" set in a small, evenly spaced typewriter-style font in black ink. The text is sharp and centred in the lower frame, with soft shading on the skin around it.

Lettering Neck Quote Text Word Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The machine came up the lane on a handcart in the week the beeches dropped their leaves, and nobody in Carrow Hollow knew what it was for. Tobias Venn, who kept the parish register and was therefore thought to know things, pushed one key with a finger and got a clatter like a hen house in a gale. The carter laughed until he wiped his eyes. He said the thing wrote itself if you asked it nicely, and he sold it to Venn for two shillings and his own old boots.

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Through the autumn Venn typed the village's grievances onto cream paper: the miller's short weights, the vicar's spaniel that barked at the font, the widow who sang to the trees at the edge of the wood. Each sheet he pinned to the church door with a blackthorn spike. The village read them, shook their heads, and said the register keeper had gone soft from the damp. Venn did not argue. He only kept typing, and the forest, which had heard every word, kept its own counsel.

One morning in the first frost there was a new sheet pinned beside his, typed in the same small even letters he used for the births and burials. He had not touched the machine since dusk, and the carriage sat at the far margin as though someone had pushed it there with a thumb. The sheet held only four words, centred neatly in the lower half of the page: we're all mad here.

The miller read it and laughed. The vicar read it and went quiet and then took off his hat. By evening the whole of Carrow Hollow had found the phrase a comfort, and the widow sang louder in the beeches, and Venn, who had never once in his life been mad, found he could no longer tell which of the letters on the church door were his.