Close-up of black typewriter-style lettering reading "the past is practice" across a bare torso, placed on the ribs.

"the past is practice" lettering on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the phrase "the past is practice" tattooed in lowercase, typewriter-style lettering across the skin of a torso. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the letters are evenly spaced along a horizontal line. A partly visible black tattoo of a figure sits at the lower right edge of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum kept the allotment for thirty-one years and never once got a courgette right on the first try. I found her typewriter in the potting shed, tucked under a sack of blood fish, with a sheet of paper still rolled into it. The top line read Leeks, sown March, and under that ran a column of failures in her neat capitals: bolted, slugs, too wet, frost again.

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I had come to clear the shed before the council took the plot back. My brother wanted the typewriter sold. I wanted to know why she typed her gardening notes instead of writing them in the battered book on the windowsill. Down the margin, in pencil, she had written a sentence I didn't understand until I walked the rows with the page in my hand: the past is practice. Beside the bean canes stood a lopsided row of dead stalks from an autumn sowing she'd rushed, and beside them a dozen new seedlings, the same variety, put in a week later.

I spent the weekend sowing. I typed each date on the old machine, the ribbon gone grey, the letters striking hard and uneven, and pinned the sheets to the shed wall. By the second week the leeks had come up in straight lines. I wrote bolted beside the things that had failed, and I did not cross them out.

On the last morning the council man came with his clipboard and asked what I was growing. I showed him the sheet. He read the bottom line twice, then laughed, not unkindly, and said his nan used to tell him the same thing about his tea. I left the typewriter on the bench for the next tenant, its carriage still set to the margin she liked best.