Small black typewriter-style lettering reading Yesterdays across the top of a bare foot, resting on a white fleece.

Yesterdays lettering on the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a bare foot with the single word Yesterdays tattooed across the top, in a small serif typewriter-style font. The lettering is crisp and dark, drawn in solid black ink with even weight, and sits in the centre of the frame. The white fleece rug and pale wooden floor give a soft, neutral background that keeps the focus on the text.

Lettering Other Text Typewriter font Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Parkview House has been broken since March, so you take the stairs with the typewriter case knocking against your shin, eleven floors of cracked lino and the smell of someone's Sunday roast. Mrs Abernethy on the ninth floor gave it to you in a carrier bag with a note that said only: he would want it fixed, not sold. You don't know who he is. You know the flat is empty now, the curtains gone, a square of brighter wallpaper where a clock used to hang.

Keep reading

Inside the case is a manual portable with a ribbon gone grey and a sheet still rolled in the platen. Someone typed one word on it, then stopped. Yesterdays, with the s hanging off the end as if the key had been pressed twice and the carriage had thought better of it. You sit on the floor under the window and work the roller with your thumb, the way your father taught you in the workshop under the railway arches, and the letters come up soft and dark on the paper.

You spend the evening cleaning the type bars with a toothbrush and methylated spirit. The new ribbon goes in from the drawer, and by midnight the machine clacks clean under your hands. You almost type something of your own, then don't. Instead you take the sheet out, fold it in three and slide it into the lid pocket, where Mrs Abernethy will find it in the morning when you bring the case back down, the machine working again and the word still waiting in its pocket.