Traditional colour tattoo on a forearm of a yellow and purple typewriter over crossed fountain pens, with a red banner reading WRITE BRAVELY.

Typewriter and crossed pens on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a typewriter sits in the centre of the forearm, with two fountain pens crossed behind it. A banner across the top and bottom reads WRITE and BRAVELY in red lettering on a yellow ground. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat yellow, purple and green fills and small dot shading on the typewriter keys.

Traditional Forearm Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The typewriter in the corner of the sports hall had lost its capital A sometime in the nineties, and Dorothy Pask had spent most of the Hallam Grammar reunion pretending not to look at it. Trestle tables sagged under sausage rolls. A man she half recognised kept telling the DJ about his brass band. Dorothy kept her hands in her cardigan pockets, because the last time she had typed in front of these people she was seventeen and Mr Ackroyd had read her essay aloud as an example of what not to do.

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Hilary Tennant found her by the urn. She still had the flat Sheffield vowels and a fountain pen clipped to her lanyard, which Dorothy would not have thought anyone still carried. "You never finished it," Hilary said. "The sea story. You had the boy walking into the water with the carbon copy in his coat." "It had a bad ending." "It had no ending. Ackroyd wrote bravely across the top of it, and you stopped at the foot of the page."

Dorothy did not argue. She crossed the parquet, slid a sheet of Basildon Bond into the roller and turned the knob until the paper sat straight. The keys were stiff under her fingers. She typed the boy's name, then the word for the cold, then nothing for a long while. Behind her the brass band man laughed at his own joke. Hilary leaned against the wall and waited, the way she had once waited outside the headmaster's study for a verdict she already knew.

When Dorothy pulled the page free, the missing A had left a clean small gap in the middle of the last line, a hole where a letter should have been. She did not fix it. She folded the sheet twice and handed it over, and Hilary read it standing up, her lips moving slightly at the blank, until she looked up and said, "Oh, that's better," as though the gap had been the point all along.