Typewriter Tattoo Meaning

Storytelling, creation, craft, and stories hammered into being.

Mark Twain was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher, and he denied it for years.

He bought a Remington typewriter in 1874 and used it to type Tom Sawyer. When people asked if he was one of the first authors to use a typewriter, he said no — he didn't want to write testimonials for the machine, which he had grown to hate because it required him to type perfectly and he was constitutionally incapable of typing perfectly. He later admitted the truth.

The typewriter arrived in the 1870s and did two things simultaneously: it made written communication faster and more legible, and it employed women in offices for the first time at scale. The typewriter operator — the typist — was initially assumed to be male, because operating machinery was male work. Within a decade, women dominated the profession, because women could be paid less and were discovered to be faster. The machine that democratized writing also restructured gender in the office.

The sound of the typewriter is specific and irreplaceable: the mechanical resistance of the key, the percussion of the typehead striking the ribbon, the bell at the end of the line, the slam of the carriage return. Writers who used typewriters report that the sound was inseparable from the thinking — that the resistance of the keys, the physical commitment required by each letter, changed how sentences were formed. The word that requires effort to type is weighed differently than the word that requires none.

The typewriter made every word permanent in a new way: not the permanence of stone or manuscript, but the permanence of ink struck hard into paper, leaving an impression on the page and on the sheet beneath it and on the one beneath that.

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