Close photo of the word recover(ed) tattooed in small black lettering on the inner forearm, with a cream electric guitar in the background.

Recover(ed) lettering on inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black word, recover(ed), runs diagonally along the inner forearm near the wrist, set in a plain typewriter-style typeface with fine, even strokes. The skin is light and the ink is dark grey-black with no colour. A cream electric guitar and a grey surface sit behind the arm, and a pink sleeve appears at the lower left.

Lettering Forearm Word Guitar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo kept the cream guitar on the top shelf of the back room, where the canal damp could not reach it, and every Thursday she took it down to check the strings. Nobody had claimed it in eleven years. The pawn ticket tied to the headstock was typed on her late husband's Olympia, and under the name it said only: recover(ed). She had never decided whether he meant the guitar or the man who left it.

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One wet night in Salford, after the shutter was half down, a thin young man knocked on the glass with the other half of the ticket between two fingers. His coat was too big for him. He said the guitar was his, that he had been away a long time, and that he had come back to see whether anything of him was still waiting. Mrs Okonedo did not ask where away was. She asked him to read her the ticket out loud.

He read it slowly. Recover. Then he stopped at the brackets and looked at them for so long that the buses went past twice outside. She pushed the Olympia across the counter and told him that a word with a bit left optional was not a debt. He typed the ending, then backspaced it, then typed it again, and the bell of the carriage return rang out in the empty shop like a small door shutting.

She handed him the guitar without a receipt. He carried it out to the pavement, sat on the kerb under the streetlamp, and tuned the low string by ear, bending his head to the sound until it held. Behind the shutter, Mrs Okonedo heard the note rise over the canal and thought, not for the first time, that some tickets are only half filled in.