Black and grey typewriter-style lettering reading 'you're going to have to save yourself' across the upper back, with dark hair pulled up behind the neck.

Typewriter quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a quote tattoo set in a typewriter-style font across the upper back, reading 'you're going to have to save yourself' over four lines. The letters have crisp, even outlines with solid black fill and a slightly uneven, inked look typical of a typewriter typeface. The soft, desaturated background and the person's hair pulled up at the neck keep the focus on the text.

Lettering Back Quote Typewriter font Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Remington at Oakes and Son Printing had a sticky E that Mr Oakes refused to have fixed, because he said a machine with a flaw was at least honest about it. Every Thursday after the bank shut I sat at it typing up funeral notices and lost dog cards for the Wexley Gazette, and I never once typed anything of my own until the evening Pearl Tanner came in with a folded sheet and asked me to set it in small capitals.

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The sheet held a single sentence in her careful schoolroom hand: you're going to have to save yourself. She wanted it printed four lines to a block, no name, no date. 'It's for my sister,' she said. 'She reads everything twice.' I asked which sister, and Pearl only tapped the paper and said the sister had married a man from the dye works who came home smelling of indigo and had stopped speaking at Christmas.

I set it line by line, letter by letter, and when I came to the word yourself the sticky E dropped its ink in a soft blot, so I had to strike the line twice to get it even. Mr Oakes came back for his tea, read over my shoulder, and said nothing about the slip except that I should mind the E. Pearl paid in coppers and asked for the spare proof. I kept it folded in my handbag for years afterwards, and when I finally left Wexley for Leeds I found I could type that sentence from memory, the E catching every time, as if the machine had been waiting for me to get it right.