Black and grey tattoo of a typewriter with a quote reading May I never be complete, on the upper arm, with letters spilling from the keys.

Typewriter with spilling letters and quote

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed typewriter sits beneath a paper strip reading May I never be complete, May I never be content, May I never be perfect, with individual letters tumbling down from the keys. The shading is smooth and tonal, with strong highlights on the metal and soft grey gradients on the paper. A close-up inset shows the quote and typewriter mechanism, and a lower inset shows a purple stencil of the same design held in a hand.

Realism Lettering Upper arm Text Letter Quote Paper Key Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry brought the typewriter over in a fish crate, wrapped in a Stornoway Gazette from 1974, and Mairi Gillies swore she had not touched it since her mother's funeral. I have fixed most of the machines on this island. Most of them jam because the salt gets into the escapement and the ribbon turns to dust. This one had no jams. Every key I pressed came back with the right letter, but the letters kept leaving the bars and dropping out of the carriage like sand through a sieve. When I lifted the cover there was a little drift of them in the well, all lowercase, all worn at the edges.

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She wanted a page typed. Just one line, she said, and she read it off a card from her handbag: May I never be complete. I typed it, and the paper fed through clean. Then she wanted the second line, and the third, and I noticed the c in content had already tumbled into the drawer. I hunted it down with tweezers and a torch while she watched the rain run down the window and talked about the ferry timetable as if it were scripture.

I asked her who had written it. She said her husband, a schoolteacher who used to post her letters from Glasgow with the stamps upside down so the postmen would grumble. The card was the only thing he ever typed that she kept. He had wanted nothing finished, she said, because a finished thing stops, and he never wanted to stop being interested in her.

I oiled the bars, reset the carriage, and when I left she had the page in her lap while the letters kept sliding, slowly, into the tray at her feet, a small grey rain she made no effort to catch. That evening I found a stray k on my bench and put it in my pocket, where it still is.