Small black lettering tattoo reading stet on the side of a torso, with a red plaid shirt lifted beside it.

Small stet lettering on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black word tattoo, reading stet, on the side of a torso. The thin, simple letters are set in a plain sans-serif style with clean linework and no shading. The image is mostly skin and a red and blue plaid shirt, with a hand and a ring at the right edge, and the tattoo sits near the centre-left.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Word Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Priya,

Keep reading

It is ten past two and the presses have gone quiet under the floor, so I am writing this on the back of a page proof, which is the only paper left in the building nobody will miss. You asked on Tuesday what the worst part of the job was. I said the corrections. That was a lie. The worst part is the nights you have to keep a line you know is wrong, because the man who wrote it is dead and it was the only true thing he filed all year.

Tonight it was Tom Halloran's piece on the lock-keeper at Ancoats, the one he wrote in March before his stroke. The sub on the desk wanted the sentence about the water cut for house style. Too florid, he said. I took the proof and read it under the lamp. Halloran had written that the canal at night held the lights of the city upside down, as if the whole town were waiting to be fished out. Water does not do that. I know it does not do that.

I wrote stet in the margin and drew the little hook beneath it, the way Mr Ashby taught us in 1987, and handed the page back across the desk. Let it stand. A printer's word for a mistake you have decided to keep.

Walk the towpath tomorrow and look down at the water. You'll understand me then.