Two black lettering tattoos in a typewriter font sit on a pair of forearms, one reading Do or die you'll never make me and the other reading Because the world will never take my heart.

Two forearm quote tattoos in typewriter lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a block of black typewriter-style lettering tattooed on the skin near the elbow. The left reads 'Do or die you'll never make me' and the right reads 'Because the world will never take my heart', both set in a slightly distressed, uneven type. The ink is black and grey, and the skin shows a light sheen, with a blurred indoor background of red and white objects.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Imperial came in on a Tuesday wrapped in a tea towel, its platen cracked and its lowercase e gone soft at the edges, and Walter Penhale set it under the good lamp before he had even taken off his coat. The customer, a Mrs Dunn from Hebden Bridge, stood by the door with her gloves still on and said she needed it working by Friday. It was the only machine her husband had ever used, and she had decided, rather suddenly, that she could not bear to hear it silent any longer.

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Walter cleaned the type bars with a stiff brush and a drop of paraffin, then wound in a sheet of thin paper and typed the lines she had written on the back of an envelope. Do or die, you'll never make me. Because the world will never take my heart. The bars struck unevenly. The d sank lower than the o, the h leaned like a man into a wind, and the word heart came out a shade lighter than the rest, as if the ribbon had run thin on that one stroke and nobody had noticed for years.

He could have fixed it. He had new ribbon in the drawer and a tin of replacement springs, and a good mechanic would have had the alignment square by teatime. Instead he sat with the sheet in his hands for a long time, listening to the rain on the skylight, and then he took out his pen and wrote the date in the margin, below the wobbling words.

On Friday she came back, pulled the sheet from the carriage and read it twice, standing up. "Leave it," she said. "Just as it is." She folded the paper into her handbag beside her purse, and Walter, who had mended a great many machines and had never once been thanked for a crooked line, found he had nothing to say at all.