Two photographs of small black typewriter-style lettering tattoos on the inner forearm, reading heart over mind and courage over fear, with a dark knit sleeve pushed up.

Typewriter words on forearm: heart, mind, courage, fear

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a diptych of two close-up photographs of a forearm with a dark knit sleeve pushed up. Each tattoo is a pair of single words in a typewriter-style serif font, with a short horizontal line between them: heart over mind in the top panel, and courage over fear in the bottom panel. The lines are clean and even, and the ink is solid black on the skin, with no visible shading or colour. The muted, low-contrast backgrounds keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Forearm Heart Courage Fear Word Text Typewriter font

Find an artist for this

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 computers on Ward Seven went down at ten past eleven, so the night handover is being typed on the grey manual in the sister's office, the one with the sticking e. You have to hit it twice and hold your breath. Through the glass the corridor lights hum at their usual pitch. In bay two a man keeps asking whether the tea trolley has been, and in bed nine a girl of nineteen has stopped asking anything at all.

Keep reading

Gwen leans in the doorway holding two mugs gone cold. The consultant rang, she says. The scan is clear enough for Thursday. Nobody has told the girl yet, and her mum has been in the family room since teatime, folding and unfolding a leaflet about discharge. You take the mugs and set them on the bin lid, because the desk is buried in paper and paper is what you have to be careful with tonight.

On the handover sheet there is a box labelled Concerns and another labelled Plan. You type the words the way a tutor taught you years ago, when a good note holds two things at once: what the heart wants, and what the mind can carry. Heart over mind, a short line between them like the bar of a fraction. Then you try the other pair, courage over fear, and find you cannot tell which one sits heavier on the page until you decide who is going to read it.

At half two you go and sit with the girl. She does not ask about Thursday. She asks whether the typewriter is still going, because she heard it through the wall. You tell her it is, slowly, and that the e sticks. She laughs, a small cracked sound, and for a while neither of you says anything more. When you go back to the office the last line is finished and the sheet is curling in the heat of the lamp, every word still legible.