Black serif lettering of a quote runs diagonally across the inner forearm of a person holding their open hand up, in a lettering style on the forearm.

Typeset quote along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is shown with several lines of black serif text tattooed in a diagonal sweep from the wrist towards the elbow. The letters are solid black ink with crisp edges, and some lines are cut off at the edges of the frame, so not every word is fully readable. The hand is raised, palm open, against a plain indoor background with framed prints on a wall.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pike had set type at Dunning and Sons for thirty-one years, and he could read a forme backwards faster than most men read the Yorkshire Post the right way round. On the Thursday the galley for chapter nineteen came up with a space dropped in the wrong place, so that two words ran into each other like boots in a queue. He swore, tipped the lines out of the stick, and started again from the top.

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The book was a thriller about a widow in Scarborough who kept a bakery and a ledger nobody else was meant to read. The author had posted the manuscript in pencil, and the pages still smelled faintly of someone's kitchen. Harold had grown fond of the widow, Mrs Abbott, who counted loaves the way other women counted rosary beads. Each night he lifted the slugs of lead into their cases, and each night the serifs seemed a little sharper, small feet planted firmly at the foot of every letter.

The proof came back on Friday with a red ring around the final paragraph. The editor wanted it cut to a single sentence, and he wanted it cut by Monday. Harold sat under the lamp for an hour, striking out words he had come to love, until only one line was left standing, and he could hear the press downstairs waiting like a held breath.

He set that line himself, inked the forme, and pulled a single proof. When he held it up to the window the black letters stood clean against the grey light, every edge crisp, nothing missing. He pinned it above the bench for the apprentice to find, and for years afterwards the boy swore he could still read it from the doorway, backwards and forwards, the way Harold always had.