Close-up of a small black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm reading 'The sky is not the limit. Your imagination is.' in a typewriter-style font.

Typewriter quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman raises one arm, showing a small black tattoo on the inner forearm. The two-line quote is set in a typewriter-style font with crisp, even linework and solid black ink. The pale background keeps the focus on the text and the arm, and the woman's face is mostly cropped out of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Olivetti arrived on a Tuesday, wrapped in a bath towel and smelling faintly of someone's airing cupboard. Walter Pell lifted the lid and found the e key jammed mid-stroke, a curl of old paper still caught under the platen. Rolled into the carriage was a line typed in pale, uneven capitals, and he read it twice before he looked at the label tied to the handle.

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The label said Mrs Dacre, Ramsgate, and underneath, in biro: My husband typed this the week before he went to sea. The letters won't sit straight any more. Please don't tidy them too much. Walter took the type segments out one at a time, brushed the grit from beneath them with a badger brush, and dabbed each arm with methylated spirit until the letters came up crisp and black. He left the faint purple ghost of the ribbon alone.

By afternoon the e sat level on the line again. Outside the window gulls were squabbling over a dropped cone of chips, and the radio in the back room gave the shipping forecast in a voice like a shut door. Walter found a fresh sheet, wound it in, and typed the second line the husband had perhaps meant to write: Your imagination is. His fingers hesitated over the full stop, then came down hard, and the carriage bell rang out across the empty shop.

When Mrs Dacre collected the machine on Friday she read the page standing up, her thumb on its edge. She said nothing. She folded it into her handbag beside a creased photograph of a ship, asked what she owed him, and when Walter named a price her hands shook so badly that he named a smaller one.