Black and grey typewriter lettering reading I told you to be patient, fine, balanced, kind, across the side of the ribs.

Typewriter quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a quote tattooed on the side of a torso, set in a typewriter-style serif font. The words I told you to be patient, fine, balanced, kind are staggered across the skin, with the lines stepping down and the last word smaller. The soft black and white tones and the close crop keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Typewriter font Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been in the Chancery of Hesk for fourteen months, typing the Lord Warden's letters on a brass machine that has learned your fingers better than any schoolmaster did. Every morning the same complaint arrives in the same grey envelope from the salt-mills at Orrin: the sluices are failing, the wages are late, the men are tired of waiting. Every morning the Warden leans over your shoulder, sniffs his pipe, and says the same thing.

Keep reading

"Tell them to be patient." You type it, and the e-key sticks, so you strike it twice and the letter comes out heavy. Patient, you write. Then, because the ribbon is running pale and the Warden has already gone down to his dinner, you add the rest from your own head: fine, balanced, kind. You could not say why. The lines step down the page like a stair with a child on every tread, and the last word comes out smaller because you have run out of margin.

The reply goes out on a Tuesday. By Thursday the sluice-gates at Orrin hold, and the men there send no thanks to the Warden, only a sack of dried plums for the Chancery clerks, with a note in a careful hand that says the plums are for whoever wrote the last line.

The Warden reads the carbon copy at his desk, sets his pipe down, and asks who typed the final words. You say you did. He is silent for a long while, long enough that the clock in the corridor strikes the half hour twice. Then he takes the sheet, pins it above the fireplace where it will stay for the rest of his years in office, and the ribbon fades until only the words kind and balanced can still be read.