Black ink lettering reading LOVE WHAT YOU DO in stacked, overlapping serif capitals on the inner wrist of a hand held up against a plain white background.

Stacked serif phrase on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand raised towards the top of the frame, with the wrist in sharp focus and the fingers softened by shallow depth of field. The tattoo is four lines of bold, condensed serif capitals in black ink, with the letters overlapping and stacked so that the words LOVE, WHAT and YOU DO interlock into a compact block. The background is plain white, which keeps the attention on the ink and the skin tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ashdown never let anyone set a line backwards twice. "Mirror it once, lad, and the press will tell you so," he said, tapping the composing stick against the edge of the bench until the lead sat square. That was the Tuesday the Halifax Courier lost its Thursday masthead and we had to reset the whole top of page one by hand.

Keep reading

The condensed serifs were his pride. He had bought the case of bold Bodoni from a shop that closed in Leeds, and he would hold a single capital up to the window and say it looked like a tall man leaning into wind. Letters had to overlap in a block, he said, or a headline wasted the space a good printer was paid to save. So we crowded them, the O over the top of the V, the W tucked under the second E, until four lines locked together like a jigsaw that had been argued into shape.

On the last night before the flood of stop-press orders, he left a proof on my stool. Four words stacked in black ink, read from the wrong side of the paper. I turned it over and found the message the right way round, in his square hand: love what you do, Mill, or go and sell shoes.

I still have that proof. I have set a great deal of type since, most of it badly, and when a line won't sit I think of him tapping the stick and saying, lock it up.

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