Black typewriter-style lettering of a reader quote tattooed along the inside of a forearm, set in a stacked block of text.

Reader quote tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with a multi-line quotation in black typewriter-style lettering. The text is set in a stacked, slightly staggered block, with consistent solid linework and even black ink. The pale skin and soft, plain background keep the focus on the words.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather close, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, for the hour is late and the candles on the carousel are guttering. You want the tale of Mother Ashdown's Reading Tent? Then you'll hear it how it was told to me, by a man who had it from a girl who swept its boards. The tent stood at the far end of the field where the lorries parked, and inside it sat a woman with a typewriter the colour of coal, and she would type you a life for a penny. Not a fortune. A life, four lines long, that you could walk into if you had the nerve.

Keep reading

A carter's boy came in one wet October, sour as old milk, saying he'd lived nothing and meant to keep it that way. Mother Ashdown only smiled and rolled a sheet into the platen. She typed for a long while, the keys going like hail on a tin roof, and then she tore the paper free and handed it over. He read it standing up. He never said what it said. He went out into the rain, and the next morning he was gone, the carter swore, and the carter's horse was gone too, and no one ever saw either of them again on the county roads.

So you see, the wise old saying is true enough. Read, and you live a thousand lives before your own is done. Shut the book and you have lived one, and that one is only the cart you were born to pull. Now off you go, and mind the lamp on your way out.