Black blackwork tattoo of a typewriter with the words Choose a dream in typed lettering beneath it, on the upper arm.

Typewriter with Choose a dream on arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black typewriter with a broken, rough-edged carriage and rows of dotted keys fills the upper part of the image. Below it, the phrase Choose a dream is set in a monospaced typewriter font, partly cut off at the right edge. The ink is black only, against lightly toned skin, with blurred bottles on a shelf in the background.

Blackwork Upper arm Key Typewriter font Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carriage jammed again on the third line of the manifest, so Ida Penhallow struck the return with the heel of her hand and listened to the bell ring out over the empty quay. Rain came sideways off the harbour wall. Through the office window the Gull's rigging knocked against its mast like someone rapping to be let in.

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Her nephew Tom stood dripping by the filing cabinet, a card in his fist. He wanted it typed for the chandler's window: deckhand wanted, any age, any sea. He had already worked out the lettering in his head, he said, he only needed it neat. Ida rolled the card in, found the ribbon nearly spent, and typed the words he gave her. Then, without asking, she added the line she had been keeping in her apron pocket for years on a torn slip. Choose a dream. The letters came out pale at the end where the ink had worn thin, and the last word ran off the edge of the card.

'That's not a job,' Tom said.

'It is if you're the one choosing,' she said, and pulled the carbon copy from the drawer, a grey ghost of the page, the letters reversed like a reflection in still water.

Tom laughed, took the original out into the wet, and pinned it beside the lifebelts on the noticeboard where the tide couldn't reach. Ida kept the carbon. Holding it up to the lamp, she read the phrase backwards and then forwards, and found it said the same thing both ways, which seemed to her the most useful thing a typewriter had ever done.