Black serif lettering tattoo reading 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness' on the upper body.

Serif quote tattoo on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a three-line quotation tattooed in a black serif typeface on pale skin. The lettering is crisp and evenly weighted, with solid black ink and no shading or colour. The text is centred in the frame with plenty of skin around it.

Lettering Other Quote Text Word Serif lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce had set type for a Bristol printer for forty years, and at four in the morning in bay six she still judged a line by its serifs. Her son had copied the words onto the back of a pharmacy bag in capitals so careful they looked typeset, and asked if I would read them to her, because she could no longer hold a book.

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I read the line under the lamp. The ward hummed the way it does after midnight, drips ticking, a trolley wheel squeaking somewhere past the sluice. Mrs Pryce moved her lips with the words before I had finished, the way you mouth a hymn you have not sung in years. Then she lifted one finger from the blanket and said, "Not Caslon. Look at the tails on the e."

I told her I could not see a thing. "Of course you can't," she said. "Nobody reads the letters any more." She asked me where the place was, the one with no darkness, and I said I did not know. She looked at me the way she must once have looked at apprentices who spaced a line badly. "It's a composing room," she said. "Where the type is always set true."

At seven her son came in with two coffees. I handed him the bag. He turned it over, read the scribbled line, and laughed until he had to sit down. "She means the old works on Temple Street," he said. "Dad used to take her in on Sundays." I did not ask whether she was right. Outside, the car park lamps were still burning, making orange puddles on the wet tarmac, and I left them on.