Black typewriter-style lettering tattooed across the upper back near the shoulder blade, set out as two lines of text.

Two-line quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of black typewriter-style lettering tattooed across the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The text reads "But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep..." in even, solid black ink with clean edges. A white wall and a window blind sit in the background, and the person's face is out of frame.

Lettering Back Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways through the Saturday market at Hebden Bridge, the sort that finds the gap between your collar and your neck, and by eleven my stall of mended typewriters smelled of wet wool and machine oil. Nobody buys a typewriter in the rain. They shelter under my awning and touch the keys as if checking a pulse.

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Mrs Dunmore came at half past eleven with a green Remington in a carrier bag. The h had stopped striking. She set it on my counter like a sleeping cat. Her husband had typed her a page every winter for forty years, she said, and the last one, from the hospital in October, had come out with the h missing from every word that needed it. She wanted it right before Christmas, and she would not say why, only that she had promised him she would type something on it herself.

I took the machine apart on the trestle table, cleaned the type bar with a bristle brush and a drop of paraffin, and bent the little arm back until the letter struck clean. When I handed it back she rolled a sheet in and pecked out a line with one finger, slowly, reading it back under her breath with her lips moving. The rain eased. She paid me in coins from a purse with a broken clasp and left the sheet in the carriage.

I didn't look at it until she had gone. Every letter was there, and the h stood as firm as the rest.