Black and grey serif lettering spelling the word arm vertically down the outer upper arm, in a lettering style.

Vertical lettering reading arm on an upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word arm in lowercase serif letters, stacked vertically down the outer upper arm. The letters are filled in dark grey or black with even, clean outlines and soft shading. The photograph shows the arm against a grey sleeve and a hand at the top left, with the tattoo placed centrally in the frame.

Lettering Upper arm Lettering Word Arm Serif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivy Pascoe had sorted type for thirty-one years at Harrow and Vell in Leeds, and she could find a lowercase r in the dark by its weight. On the Tuesday the foreman, Dennis, came down the back stairs holding a galley proof out in front of him like a summons. "The Otley school wants their reader's chart set again," he said. "They've lost the word arm off the bottom row."

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The chart was a row of pictures with a word under each: hat, dog, cup, arm. Ivy went to the case and pulled the small letters, the a with its soft round bowl, the r with its little serif foot, the m that always wanted to topple. She set them stacked in the stick, one above the other, because the drawing showed a boy's arm held straight up, and a line of type laid flat would read as a sentence instead of a limb. Dennis looked at it upside down and frowned. "Nobody reads down."

"Children do," she said. "They trace a thing with a finger when they're learning it." She had taught her own boy his letters from a stacked alphabet pinned above the range, and he had never once read left to right until he was seven. He drove a bus in Bradford now and sent postcards that said only fine, fine, fine.

The revised proof came back with a note in a teacher's loose hand asking whether the arm could be bolder. Ivy inked the forme herself, pulled the sheet and held it to the window. The three letters ran down the white paper like a plumb line. On the margin she wrote, in pencil, the old printers' word for setting type ready to run, and then she crossed it out, because it was only ever meant for the men who worked the press.