Black and grey photograph of the words "still I rise." in a typewriter-style font, curved across the inner forearm near the wrist.

"still I rise." lettering on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a pale inner forearm and wrist, with the phrase "still I rise." tattooed in a curved line across the skin. The lettering is set in a typewriter-style serif font, drawn in solid black ink with crisp edges. The background is dark and softly blurred, which keeps the focus on the text.

Lettering Forearm Text Phrase Wrist Typewriter font

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

Mrs Dacre brought her grandfather's Olympia into the shop wrapped in a bath towel, as though it had a fever. The platen had seized and two type bars had locked together in the basket, so every key only clacked and gave up. I spent three evenings on it under the lamp, freeing the arms one at a time with a pin and a drop of paraffin, until the carriage ran smooth enough to draw a sheet through without a catch.

Keep reading

She came back on the Friday to collect it and asked me to test it. I typed the only line she knew by heart, the one her grandfather had pinned above his desk in the print works in Hull. Still I rise. The capitals jumped a little where the ribbon had dried, the full stop struck hard, and she laughed in a way that made the man at the next counter look up from his radio.

He had set headlines by hand for forty years, she told me, and never trusted a sentence he hadn't stood up in lead. When the works closed in 1947 nobody would hire a compositor with a bad chest, so he bought this machine on the never-never and typed letters to every firm on the docks. None of them answered. He kept the carbon of each one anyway.

She rolled the test sheet out and folded it into her coat pocket. Before she left, she asked me to fit a fresh ribbon so the words would hold. I did. The letters came up dark and even along the curve of the roller, and when I ran a thumb across the top line, the ink did not come off on my skin.