Black and grey lettering tattoo of a quote set in typewriter-style type across the upper arm.

Typewriter-style quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a quotation in uneven lines of typewriter-style lettering, reading 'to live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong'. The letters are solid black with soft edges, and the lines are staggered and indented across the skin. The black and white photograph is taken close up, with the lettering sitting in the centre of the frame against pale skin.

Lettering Upper arm 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 Imperial in the back room at Pryce and Sons had a bent e-bar, so every e came out a shade heavier than its neighbours. Mr Pryce would not pay a man from Bradford to straighten it, so for a year I typed around the fault, leaning on my wrists and easing the keys down as if they might bruise. I was seventeen and I wanted nothing on that paper to show that I had made it.

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Thursdays, Mrs Abbott came in with verse written in pencil on the backs of seed catalogues. She wanted the parish notices typed up with her poems set between them, and she read each line aloud before I touched the keys. Half of them she had crossed out and left legible. When I asked why she kept the crossings, she tapped the page and said, 'A line you've struck through still tells the truth about the day you wrote it. Fear is when you rub it out and pretend.'

One Thursday in March I mistyped a church date, struck the wrong bar, and the carriage jammed on the return. The line came out staggered, the words tumbling sideways across the sheet like something dropped down stairs. I sat with my hands in my lap, sure I would be sacked. Mrs Abbott leaned over, read it twice, and laughed until she needed her handkerchief. 'Leave it,' she said. 'Print it exactly like that.'

She has been dead eleven years now. Last month I found the carbon of that page folded inside a seed catalogue at the bottom of a box, the fat e's marching through a line about nothing I can remember, and I pinned it above my own desk. Every morning I sit down, lean on my wrists, and type the first thing that comes, crooked and unfinished, and leave it there.