Black typewriter-style poem lettering tattooed on skin, with small dots trailing down below the final words.

Typewriter poem lettering on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black-ink tattoo of a multi-line poem set in a typewriter-style font runs across the skin in a loose, slightly uneven layout. Below the verse, the words moments, before and the appear on separate lines, followed by a descending trail of small dots. The photograph is sepia-toned and monochrome with soft light, and a handwritten number 37 appears at the top right.

Lettering Other Text Typewriter font Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Rennie had mended forty-one typewriters since Easter, and Mrs Hale's machine was the only one that arrived wrapped in a tea towel with a page still rolled in the carriage. He unrolled it on the bench above the harbour wall while gulls argued over the fish boxes. The poem was typed in capitals he had to squint at, its lines uneven where the platen had slipped, and at the bottom someone had written in pencil: moments before the.

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The rest was dots. Each one was a full stop where a key had struck the paper and sprung back, as if the typist had lifted her fingers mid-word and never returned to it. Tobias counted them against the tide chart pinned by the door. Seven, then a gap, then a smaller one.

Mrs Hale came in at four with a flask and a face like wet slate. She had typed it, she said, the week her husband took the Carrick out and the boat came back without him. She had meant to finish the sentence. Every evening she sat down to it, and every evening the keys stuck, and she could not decide what the last word ought to be.

Tobias fitted a fresh ribbon, ran the carriage to the margin and typed one word beneath the pencil: harbour. Then he slid the page back under the roller and handed it across the counter. She read it twice, folded it into her coat and walked out along the wall without saying thank you, which he took as the right thing.