Black lettering tattoo on the inner upper arm, with a three-line typewriter-style quote above the words Still I'll rise in script.

Two-line quote and script tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a poem excerpt in a typewriter-style serif font across three lines, with the words Still I'll rise in a separate handwritten script below. Both pieces use crisp, thin black linework with no shading, set against a pale skin tone. The composition is a close-up of the inner arm, with the text running horizontally across the frame.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Quote Text Typewriter font Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had the Olivetti on her kitchen table before the kettle was cold, and she typed the way other women swore, fast and without apology. Each morning the harbour boys brought her letters to put right: a complaint to the council, a sweetheart's note they could not spell, a telegram to a brother in Hull who had stopped writing back. She charged a penny a line and never once asked what the words were for.

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The Tuesday the lifeboat failed to come back, the boys brought her nothing. They stood in her doorway with their caps in their hands, and she sat with the machine silent for an hour. Then she rolled a clean sheet in and typed out what her mother used to say about the sea: that the moon pulls the water whether anyone is watching or not, that the tide turns at its own hour, and that a person can set a clock by it if they have the patience to stand still.

She pinned the sheet to the chapel noticeboard and went home. Nobody read it at first. Then the wives came, one by one, to copy it out on their own paper and fold it into their purses, and by Thursday there were more copies on the windows of the fish shops than there were lamps.

At dawn on the Friday the boat came round the point two days late, with one man short and one man found, and the women were already on the quay. Mrs Hollis was there too, with her coat over her nightdress. She had typed the date beneath the poem that morning, in capitals, and the ribbon was worn thin by then, so she had pressed hard on every key to make the letters hold.