Close-up of a black typewriter-style lettering tattoo reading smart, kind, important across the upper back.

Smart, kind, important lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a single line of black typewriter-style lettering reading smart. kind. important. across the upper back, with the skin appearing warm and reddish in tone. The linework is solid and even, with the text filling the middle of the frame and a small framed picture visible in the top left corner.

Lettering Back Word Text Quote Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The card had been wedged under the carriage of the grey typewriter since before Lorraine started, its corners gone soft as flannel. Three words, typed in capitals that had long since bled into the paper. Ada Pell had put it there in 1968, the year the council squeezed the typing pool into the old wool exchange, when the girls kept asking what they were supposed to do up there with the damp coming through the ceiling and no heating until ten.

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Lorraine's first letter was a notice about the bin collection for a man on Mill Lane. She typed it in four minutes and it was curt, almost rude. Ada read it over her glasses, took a pencil from behind her ear, and drew a line through the second paragraph. "He's asked you one thing," she said. "Smart is working out what the one thing is. Kind is answering it the way you'd want it answered if the bins were yours. Important is the bit you're tempted to skip because nobody will check." Lorraine retyped it. The man on Mill Lane replied by return, in pencil, to say thank you and that his wife had always done the letters.

Ada retired the spring after, and the card stayed where it was. Years later, when the wool exchange was flats and the typewriter had gone to a repair shop in Halifax, Lorraine finally eased the card free to clean the carriage. On the back, in the same pencil, Ada had written: Your turn to add one.