Colour traditional tattoo of a green typewriter with a red dotted arch and orange flowers below it, on the calf.

Typewriter and flowers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A green typewriter with a grey carriage and a black keyboard of white keys sits at the centre, framed by a red dotted arch with radiating lines behind it. Three flowers in orange, red and teal with black outlines run along the bottom edge. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give it a classic traditional look, and the design fills the frame against a plain background.

Traditional Calf Flower Dot Arch Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The green machine came up from the auction rooms on a Tuesday, wrapped in a bedsheet, and Mrs Pask made me carry it up the back stairs of the Lantern Hotel myself. Its carriage was stiff and its bell rang a half second late, but by Friday I could type a whole letter without looking down at the keys, those white ones with dark wells beneath them like the eyes of small gulls.

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Most of the work was for the fishing wives. They came up the hill with envelopes already addressed in pencil, asking me to copy their husbands' names onto the forms for the pension office, and I typed them in capitals so nothing could be misread. Ada Quick brought a jam jar of sweet william every time. She said the flowers were payment and the typing was a kindness, and she would not hear otherwise.

The letter that came back in October had been written on my paper, in a hand I did not know. It thanked Ada for the flowers and asked why her R always sat lower than the other letters. Ada had never sent it. The R had dropped on her own machine in August, and her husband Eli had gone over the rocks off Foreness in September. I held the page to the window and saw that every line in it was struck a little crooked, the way mine were when I was tired.

I put the sheet in the drawer under the spare ribbons and said nothing to Ada. Some mornings I still hear the carriage return, a bright double knock, like the harbour lamps being lit one at a time along the front.