Black typewriter-style lettering reading the heart of life is good on the upper arm, with a red and purple checked shirt beside it.

Typewriter quote on the upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of the words the heart of life is good, set over two lines in a typewriter-style serif font. The letters are crisp, solid black with no shading, and the text sits on the outer upper arm against a soft, lightly lit background. A red and purple checked shirt fills the left side of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The typewriter came to me in a biscuit tin marked Platform 4, unclaimed, and nothing else. Mr Oduya, who ran the lost property cupboard at Kettleby Junction for thirty-one years, kept the tin on the top shelf behind the umbrellas, and only handed it down the week his knees gave out and the job passed to me. Somebody left a heart behind, he said, and that was the whole of his explanation.

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It was a squat grey Olivetti with a ribbon gone the colour of weak tea. Someone had rolled a card into it and typed the same line again and again, the letters punched so hard they bit through the paper. I cleaned the keys with a toothbrush and a drop of paraffin. On the Thursday the eleven-fifteen was cancelled and the platform filled with people who had nowhere to be, I set the machine on the ticket counter and offered to type anything they liked, free of charge.

A woman asked me to type her mother's address, which she could no longer remember, so she dictated the postcode and I guessed the rest. A boy typed his name nine times because he liked the clatter. A man in a good wool coat wrote a letter to a brother he had not spoken to since their father's funeral, folded it twice, and asked me to post it in the box by the barrier. I did not read any of them. I only watched the carriage return with each line, the small bell ringing at the end, and the platform growing quieter as each page slid off the roller.

When the last train finally pulled in, a girl of about nine tugged the card free and held it up to me. Beneath the old line she had typed, in careful capitals, AND THE TRAIN IS LATE. I laughed so suddenly that the man in the good coat turned round. Then I put her card in the tin with the others, because it seemed to me the sentence had been waiting all this time for someone to argue with it.