Black script lettering reading self made or never made on the inner wrist and forearm, with fingers curled above and a ring on one finger.

Self made or never made script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo on the inner wrist, reading self made or never made in a flowing script with the word or set smaller between the two lines. The lettering uses solid black lines with soft grey shading at the edges, and the skin is lit evenly against a dark sleeve and a grey background. The composition is centred on the wrist with the curled fingers and a ring visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Script Quote Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobiah had been told the seal would hold for forty years, which was longer than anyone on Ferrow Station expected a seal to hold anything. He turned the cutter in the gallery light and watched the fine lines of the printed sleeve crawl across the bench. Behind him the lathes kept up their steady argument with the dark.

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The machine that had made the sleeve had no name, only a serial stamped under its hopper, and it had never once asked whether the parts it built were its own. Tobiah had asked. Twice a shift he asked, and twice a shift the foreman told him the question was above his grade. So he kept his own tally, scratching a mark on the underside of the workbench for each part that came off the line with a flaw he had put there himself.

Then the courier came up from the cargo ring carrying a sealed box and a handwritten slip. Inside the box was a child's pressure glove, scuffed at the knuckle, and a note in careful capitals: MY MOTHER SAYS THE LINE MADE HER. I WANT TO KNOW IF THAT IS TRUE. Tobiah read it twice, then pulled the bench light down until it shone on the cuff, where someone had stitched initials in thread too thin to be issued.

He did not answer the note that night. He sat with the glove under the lamp and turned it over, feeling for the seam where a hand had finished what the machine had started. At the third shift bell he found it, a small crooked loop, and understood that the answer was not in the factory at all. He wrote back in his own cramped hand: Not made. Finished. Both of us finished it.