Black and grey typewriter-style lettering tattoo of a four-line quote across a person's upper back, shown in a black and white photograph.

Typewriter quote across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back and shoulder blade, with their hair visible at the top edge and no face shown. Four lines of typewriter-style text run across the skin in black ink, with the lines stepped and right-aligned for the middle two. The background shows a clothes rack and a framed picture, softly lit, and the image is entirely greyscale.

Lettering Back Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bar on Dacre Street had been closed since March, but Ruth still had a key, and she let herself in at half past two with the rain running off her collar. Nobody had told her to stop coming. Nobody had told her anything at all, which was how Desmond liked it, and how she had liked it too, for eleven years, until the afternoon she typed the lines on the back of an envelope and found herself reading them aloud to the empty booths.

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She had written them for the girl who sang on Thursdays, the one with the cracked Bakelite microphone and the voice like a struck match. The lines were meant to be a joke, something to hand across the bar when Desmond started in about the price of gin. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. Nobody laughed. The girl had stopped singing in May and moved to Leeds, and the lines had stayed in the drawer with the unpaid tabs and the spare bulbs.

On the wall behind the bar, the coat rack still held Desmond's grey mac, forgotten since the spring. Ruth pulled it down and found the old typewriter underneath it, its ribbon dry, its carriage still stiff. She rolled a sheet in, pressed the keys hard enough to leave the words biting through the paper, and typed the last line once more so the bar would know it had been heard. Touch me and you'll burn. Then she switched off the lamp and went out into the rain without locking the door.