Black lettering tattoo reading "If you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough" in a typewriter font across the upper arm, with a camera held over the face.

Typewriter quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A man photographs himself with a Canon camera, so his face is hidden behind the lens. Across his upper arm, two lines of black typewriter-style lettering read "If you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough". The lines are crisp and evenly spaced against pale skin, with part of a darker tattoo visible at the lower left edge of the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Text Quote Typewriter font Camera

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Olympia came into my shop on a Tuesday, wrapped in a feed sack and smelling of motor oil. Mrs Abernathy's nephew left it on my counter with a shrug, the kind that says he'd rather have dropped a snake. I spent the afternoon freeing a sticky e and wiping decades of dust from the platen, and when I rolled the carriage back I found a sheet of carbon paper still tucked behind the ribbon, the ghost of someone's last letter.

Keep reading

The words had punched through the thin paper in places, but I could read enough. Dell, come home or don't, but stop writing me sorry notes you never post. Under it the typist had written the line that stuck with me all week, If you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough, and then struck it out with a row of x's so hard the keys had left little craters in the page.

Dell Corrigan walked in on Friday, older than his photograph, with a suitcase tied shut by baling twine. He didn't look at the typewriter. He looked at the carbon in my hand and went quiet the way a man does when a debt comes due. "She kept it," he said. "I figured she'd burn it." I told him the machine was fixed and he could have it. He shook his head and asked if I had a clean sheet and a steady pair of hands.

We carried the Olympia out to the kerb in the late sun and he sat on his suitcase and typed one line, slow, two fingers, each key falling like a clock tick. When he pulled the page free he folded it into his shirt pocket without reading it back. The wind off the flats took the carbon before I could stop it, and it went tumbling down Main Street like a moth that had finally made up its mind.