Close-up of a black typewriter-style lettering tattoo reading I'm a recovering undercover overlover, placed across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Typewriter quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a black ink tattoo of a three-line quote set in a typewriter-style serif font, reading I'm a recovering undercover overlover. The lines are crisp and even, with solid black letterforms and no visible shading. The text sits centred on bare skin across the upper back, with a faint pale line curving beneath it and a corner of plastic film visible at the lower edge.

Lettering Back Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Middle Street knew that Frank Osei had spent eleven years inside other people's lives, because nobody had thought to ask. He fixed typewriters above the bakery now, and he liked the honesty of a sticking key. When the woman with the green Olympia climbed the stairs on a wet Thursday, he sat her under the skylight, lifted the cover off without a word, and listened to the machine tell him what was wrong.

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The trouble with a good cover, Frank had learned, was that it grew roots. He had been a shipping clerk in Rotterdam, a widower in Lyon, a man called Terry who sold industrial fans in Hull. Each identity had been convincing enough to open a door. Somewhere in the third year the lies began to feel like lodgers who had stopped paying rent, and he could no longer say which of his names had been his own.

She watched his hands while he worked the carriage back and forth. "The capital I keeps jamming," she said. "Can you fix it?" He eased the type bar free with a thumbnail and felt the hammer fall true. "It only sticks when it's trying to say something big," he said, and she laughed, a short surprised sound, and asked him to test it.

He rolled a sheet of scrap paper in and typed slowly, the letters striking clean and black. I'm a recovering undercover overlover. Underneath it, in a smaller hand, she added her own line and slid the paper back across the bench. Frank folded the sheet once and put it in his shirt pocket, where it stayed for the rest of the afternoon, the first honest document he had owned in years.