Close-up of a typewriter-style quote, 'Art Is The Weapon Imagination IS The Ammunition', in black ink with multicoloured watercolour splashes on the ribs.

Quote with watercolour splashes on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo sets the lines 'Art Is The Weapon Imagination IS The Ammunition' in black typewriter-style lettering across the side of the ribcage. Soft watercolour splashes in pink, blue, green and orange spread behind and around the text, with drips running downward. The photo is taken close up, with a pink lace garment at the top of the frame and skin at the lower edge.

Lettering Ribs Quote Lettering Text Watercolour splashes Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Odile Greaves came into my shop on Tanner Row with an Imperial 66 under one arm and a paint tin under the other. She set the machine on my counter, prised the lid off the tin, and asked whether I could make a typewriter print the colour of a wet sky. I told her a typewriter prints only what it's given. She said that was the trouble with most people.

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She had been a sign-writer before the war, she said, and had lost two fingers to a platen press in 1951, so she took up the Imperial instead, because a machine that bites is at least honest about it. Every morning she typed one line on a sheet of cheap foolscap, then splashed the sheet with whatever colour the window light gave her. The line never changed: Art is the weapon, imagination is the ammunition. Her husband had said it to a magistrate once, and the magistrate had fined him five shillings for contempt.

I cleaned the type bars for her, sixpence a bar, and kept the ribbon oiled. In return she gave me the spoiled sheets, which I pinned above my bench. By spring the wall was a rainbow of ink runs with the same sentence marching through every colour. Two customers asked to buy one. I said they were not for sale, the first time in thirty years I had refused money for anything.

When the council came to clear Tanner Row, Mrs Greaves was already in a bungalow in Harrogate. She left the Imperial with me and a note: the ribbon is the last of its kind, and the paint is for whoever has the nerve to use it. I still have the machine. When someone brings me a ruined letter to mend, I ask them first what they meant to say.