Black and grey photograph of the inner forearm with the lettering tattoo It's history. It's poetry. set in a typewriter-style font.

Typewriter quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an arm showing a small line of text tattooed along the forearm, reading It's history. It's poetry. The letters use a thin, typewriter-style serif typeface in black ink, set in a single straight line that follows the curve of the arm. The background is dim and out of focus, so the forearm stands out as the bright central subject.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pelling had been copying the Calder Lock parish registers since the spring, and by August her fingers knew the keys better than her husband's name. The sheriff's office had sent over the ledger of the 1841 flood with its pages stuck together, and she was meant to transfer the names in neat capitals onto the county form. Instead she kept stopping at the entry for a drowned lock-keeper, Jonas Vane, whose trade was listed as waterman and whose cause of death was written in a hand that had shaken.

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"You're dawdling," said Mr Okafor from the next desk, not unkindly. He was the archivist, a man who had once tried to explain to her that a date was a fact and a fact was a kind of mercy. "It's history, Ada. Put the names down and go home."

She pulled the sheet from the roller and held it to the lamp. "It's history," she said. "It's also a man who went out in the rain to open a gate for a barge he never saw arrive. Call that poetry if you like. I'd call it the only true line in the book."

Mr Okafor said nothing for a while. Then he came over, took the carriage return from her hand, and typed the Vane entry himself, slowly, two-fingered, adding beneath the cause of death a single line the county would never print. When he had finished he tapped the bar twice and went back to his desk. Ada read the new line through the glass of the lamp: the gates had held that night, because a waterman had gone out to keep them.