Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo reading "type one" with chevron symbols below it, on the inner wrist, in fine line lettering style.

Small fine line "type one" wrist tattoo

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo on the inner wrist shows the words "type one" in lowercase, with a row of chevron and caret-like symbols beneath them. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The hand is raised against a soft grey tree print, with a knitted sleeve visible at the bottom left of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Text Symbol Chevron

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo had marked the proof in red pencil before I'd got my coat off, and the first thing I learned at Harcourt Street Printers was that a caret means insert here and nothing else. He drew them like small roofs. Under every line that needed a word he put one, and under every line that needed a space he put a pair of chevrons pointing the wrong way, so that the compositors would know to pull the two halves apart.

Keep reading

Type one, he called the old cast face on the top shelf, the first size the works had ever bought. Nobody used it any more. The matrices had gone to a scrap merchant in Bradford, but he kept one slug on his desk, a grey brick of a letter with its face worn soft, and when I got a sentence wrong he would tap it twice with his fingernail and say nothing at all.

The week the new phototypesetter arrived, I found him in the back room at seven with the lights off, sitting before a case of loose sorts and picking them into the right boxes by hand. I asked whether he wanted the machine switched on. He said the machine could set a line but could not tell me where a sentence wanted breathing. He pushed a capital T across the bench to me. "Put that where it belongs," he said. "Then go home."

I put it in the first box I found with a lowercase t beside it, and the next morning there was a chevron drawn under my line, and beside it, in his square hand, the single word good.