Black typewriter-style lettering across the upper back reads nothing of me is original, with the person's face out of frame.

Typewriter quote tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from behind of a person with dark hair tied in a ponytail, showing a quote in black typewriter-style lettering across the upper back. The text is set in several centred lines, with crisp, even linework and solid black ink. The warm, slightly soft photo shows a pink wall and white panelling behind.

Lettering Back Quote Word Text

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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 to me in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a tea towel that smelled of someone's gas fire. Dolores Vane, who ran the typewriter repair counter above the bakery on Crosshills Road, had taught me to clean the platen and set the escapement, and when she retired to Whitby she left me the bench, the oil cans and one rule: never throw away a ribbon with words still on it.

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The Olympia's ribbon was nearly spent. I wound it through my fingers under the lamp and read backwards, the way you have to, and found a letter to a sister in Bradford about a lost engagement ring, a shopping list, three lines of a poem that never finished, and a cheque stub with a name I half knew from the Co-op. Somebody had typed on this machine for thirty years, and every owner had left a skin of themselves on the roller.

I spent a week getting it to strike clean. On the Friday the man who had brought it in, a wiry fellow called Halloran in a donkey jacket, came back for it, and I told him it was ready. He lifted the machine and held it like a sleeping cat. Then he asked whether I had read the ribbon, and I said I had, a bit.

"Then you'll know none of it's his," he said. "My dad typed the first half. Mum did the rest. I'm only the one who kept it dusted." He tapped the keys, one letter at a time, and the ink came up crisp and black on a scrap of paper: nothing of me is original. I have sat with that sentence since, and I still can't tell whose it is.