Black typewriter-style lettering reading On the road again across the top of a foot, close to the ankle.

Typewriter lettering on the foot

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a foot showing black text in a typewriter-style font that reads On the road again, running along the top and side of the foot. The letters are crisp, evenly spaced and solid black with no shading. The ink sits on lightly tanned skin against a dark background, and the foot fills most of the frame.

Lettering Ankle Text Quote Road

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the drain by the fish stall, love, it has been running since Tuesday. Pull that upturned crate closer and sit where you can see my hands, because hands are the honest part of any story. This one begins with a black portable typewriter that came to me in a biscuit tin full of rainwater, its carriage cracked and its ribbon gone to grey.

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The woman who owned it was called Nell Harrow, and she drove long-haul for a firm out of Doncaster. Every time she came home she sat at the kitchen table and typed the same line on the back of a postcard before she left again. She typed it slowly, one key at a time, as if the words had to be pressed in before the lorry would start. The machine remembered her, too. The bar for the capital O snapped one winter, so every O she wrote came out as a little triangle, and she never once had it fixed.

Her husband kept the postcards, forty-one of them, in a shoebox under the bed. When Nell died, he brought the typewriter down here with the box and asked me to clear the sticking keys so nothing else would be stuck. I cleaned every bar with a brush and a drop of oil. The triangle stayed, because it was hers.

Sell it on, he said, somebody young should have a go. So I did, to a lad from the flats who wanted to write to his nan. He pressed the keys so hard the paper tore. Then he laughed, wiped the rain from his face, and typed, On the road again, with a triangle at the front. Mind the drain on your way out, love.