Black lettering on the inner forearm reads 'and the rest is rust and stardust' in a typewriter-style font, with a beaded bracelet at the wrist.

Quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the words 'and the rest is rust and stardust' written across it in a single line of black typewriter-style lettering. The letters are solid and even with crisp edges, set against pale skin and a dark leather background. A white beaded bracelet sits at the wrist, and the composition is centred on the horizontal line of text.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Mould kept the typewriter in the back of the chapel hall because nobody else in Thorne Hollow would touch it. It was a grey Imperial with a sticking e, and every Thursday she oiled its arms and typed the names of the dead onto cards for the sexton, one letter at a time, while the rain came down on the tin roof.

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Her father had told her the machine came from a wrecked bus outside Gainsborough, though no one could say which year. He said the keys had rusted in the bus and the rust had got into the metal the way gossip gets into a village, so that anything typed on it came out with a faint orange shadow beneath the ink. Ada never saw the shadow. She only saw the lettering, black and square and even, and she typed what the vicar asked.

The summer the reservoir dried, a boy came up from the railway with a sheet of paper and asked her to type what he could not say aloud. She rolled it in and typed slowly: and the rest is rust and stardust. He wanted it for his mother's stone. The mother had worked the night shift at the foundry and once told him the iron in the pits was older than the sun, that all of it had been made in something burning and falling. Ada thought that was nonsense, then thought about it all week.

When the stone was cut, the mason sent back a rubbing. Ada pinned it above the machine. Each Thursday after that she typed a little less, and the names on the cards seemed to sit lighter on the page, as if the rust had finally flaked away and let them drift up off the paper.