Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind, with typewriter-style lettering tattooed across her upper back and sleeve tattoos on both arms.

Typewriter text tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hands raised in her hair is photographed from behind, showing a block of typewriter-style lettering across her upper back in black ink. The lettering is set in several lines of small, evenly spaced text, with dark, crisp linework and solid black letterforms. The sleeve tattoos on both arms appear in grey shading, and the greyscale photograph has a plain, light background.

Lettering Back Upper arm Forearm Woman Text Sleeve Star Hair Hand

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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 snow shut the Harrow road on Tuesday, so the post will not reach the valley before Thursday, and the inn is ours until then. Mrs Pell left her black typewriter on the bar when she went up to bed, its ribbon nearly spent, and I have spent the evening striking the same keys to make a poem sit straight on the page. Every line wants to drift to the right like a cart on ice.

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The poem is Alder's, not mine. He wrote it on the back of a bill of lading in the spring and gave it to me folded small, asking me to copy it out fair before his boat sailed for Bergen. I have copied it four times now. Each time the words settle a little more firmly, the way a stone settles once the frost has gone out of the ground. Carrots on the boil, the fire banked, nobody coming up the lane.

When I asked him why he wanted it typed rather than written, he said a hand can lie about how much it means, but a machine only prints what you press down hard enough. I pressed hard tonight. The letters bit through the paper and left small craters on the other side, and I thought of the ribbon wearing thin under all that insistence.

On Thursday, when the plough comes through, I will post it to Bergen with a stamp that cost more than his boat fare. Let him read it in a cold room and decide for himself whether a machine can carry a man home. I have typed the last line twice, and both times the carriage has rung like a small bell, announcing that the page is full and the road is open again.