Black lettering tattoo of a quote in a serif typewriter-style font running across the inner forearm, with grass in the background.

Quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm rests on grass, showing a line of black serif lettering that reads as a quote across two lines. The letters are solid black with clean, even edges and little visible shading. The text runs diagonally across the arm, with the warm, slightly faded tones of the background softening the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tolley kept the typewriter under a tea towel on the hall table, as though it might catch a draught, and each Thursday it fell to me to lift the cover and feed it a sheet of Basildon Bond. Nobody else at Gull Cottage would touch it. The keys stuck if you hurried them, so I learned to wait between letters, one finger and then the next, the way you might sand a piece of driftwood.

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I came to the boarding house in September with a trunk and a bad chest, meaning to stay a fortnight. The sea wind climbed Cliff Road every evening and rattled the sashes, and by October I had stopped counting the days. Arthur Penhale, who took the back room and read the shipping columns aloud to nobody, asked me once whether I was waiting for a letter. I said I was only waiting for the ink to dry.

Mrs Tolley's nephew wrote from Plymouth every few weeks, and she dictated her replies to me in the afternoons, pausing to watch the rain run down the glass. On the last Thursday of the month she stopped mid-sentence and frowned at the wall. "Read it back, dear," she said. I read back what I had typed, and she laughed, short and surprised. "Well. That's the truth of it, isn't it."

That night I wrote the line out again on my own paper, the way the machine had set it: I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. I folded it into the trunk beneath my winter coat, where the wind could not reach it, and went down to breakfast the next morning without once thinking of leaving.