Lettering tattoo on a forearm with a book-themed text quote in blue, purple and black serif and sans-serif fonts, with an ampersand and a small flourish.

Typographic book quote on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo made up of several lines of text set in different typefaces, including bold capitals, italic serifs and small lowercase lines, arranged in a loose block across the arm. The letters are outlined and shaded in dark blue and purple, with a purple ampersand and a looping black flourish near the wrist. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain light background, with the sleeve of a dark top visible at the top edge.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Book Ampersand Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Vane shut the last page of the paperback with the flat of her hand, the way you might close a door on a noisy room, and stared at the slatted bench beneath her. Platform four at Crewe was full of people eating crisps from paper bags, a child kicking a suitcase, and a man in a hi-vis jacket swearing softly into his phone about a points failure. Nobody had noticed that she had just been wrecked by a novel about a lighthouse keeper's daughter.

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She looked up. The departure board clicked over. A tannoy announced that the 17:42 to Manchester was running eleven minutes late, and a woman in a green scarf sighed as though it were a personal insult. Dorothy wanted to stand on the bench and tell them all. Instead she turned to the stranger beside her, a retired signalman called Ferris with a tartan flask, who had been reading the same page of his newspaper for twenty minutes.

"Do you ever finish something," she said, "and then find the whole world has just carried on as if nothing happened?"

Ferris lowered the paper. "Every Tuesday for forty years," he said. "Which one was it?" She held up the book. The cover showed a grey sea and a single yellow window. He nodded slowly. "My wife read that one. Cried in the bath, then went down to the chippy for cod."

The train came in, doors sighing open. Dorothy stood, tucked the book under her arm, and found herself smiling at the chip-shop joke. She stepped aboard, and as the carriage pulled away she saw Ferris already back behind his newspaper, the flask lifted to his lips, the station going on around him exactly as before.