Two black typewriter-style words, Relapse and Recover, tattooed on a pair of wrists in a lettering design.

Relapse and recover wrist tattoos

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms are shown with the wrists side by side, each bearing a single word in a black typewriter-style font: Relapse on the left and Recover on the right, both followed by a full stop. The lettering is fine and even, with soft shading at the edges of the characters. The warm skin tones contrast with a purple fabric at the left edge and a green fabric at the right, and the words sit close to the centre of each wrist.

Lettering Other Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the carriage off the Olympia before I'd filled the kettle, and by the time I came through with two mugs she was cursing the platen as if it owed her money. "It keeps doing this," she said, and tore a sheet from the roller so I could see. Someone had typed one word down the page again and again, the letters crowding into each other where the machine had hammered them. Relapse. Relapse. Relapse. At the bottom, lighter, a second word had been struck once and then left alone.

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The owner was a Mr Pruett from Withernsea, who had bought the typewriter at a house clearance and brought it in wrapped in a bath towel, smelling of someone else's cigarettes. He said his late wife had written her letters on it for thirty years and that it had been silent since the winter she went into hospital. He did not say why it had started again, and we did not ask. The fault was a perished felt pad under the ribbon spool, which cost four pounds and an afternoon. I told Nell the afternoon was the expensive part.

We worked until the streetlamps on Hessle Road came on, the radio low on the shelf, Nell's fingers black with oil. When the pad was seated and the spool turned true, she wound in a fresh sheet and nodded for me to go first. I typed the only word I could think of, in capitals, and the bell rang at the end of the line the way it must have rung for a woman at a kitchen table in another decade.

Nell read it aloud, slowly, the way you read a shop sign in a language you almost speak. "Recover," she said. Then she folded the sheet into an envelope, addressed it to Mr Pruett in her neat schoolgirl hand, and pressed the flap down with her thumb.