Black lettering tattoo reading 'Too weird to live, too rare to die' with a small arrow above it, across the upper back and neck.

Handwritten quote and arrow on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows a rough, handwritten quote arranged in stacked lines, with a small arrow above the text. The linework is uneven and bold, with no shading, and the lettering sits in the centre of the upper back below the neckline. The skin is pale and lit from the side, and the subject's face is not visible.

Lettering Back Quote Text Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The board was still tacky when Dilys Mawby leaned it against the bench and stepped back to look. Her brush had run dry on the last few words, so the letters came out uneven, leaning into one another like gulls on a wire. Mr Pardoe had paid for gold leaf and a clean serif. Instead he would get a crooked arrow pointing at the lifeboat slipway and the words she had been painting in her head since March.

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"Too weird to live," she read aloud to the empty workshop, "too rare to die." It was a line her grandfather used to say over the bench when a sign went wrong and he had to start again. He never explained it, and she never asked. Outside, the gulls were disagreeing about it on the harbour wall.

Pardoe came at four with his nephew and a clipboard. He read the board twice, lips moving, then asked whether it could be made to look less as if a man had written it in a hurry. "A woman wrote it," Dilys said, "and she was in a hurry. So are the lifeboat men when the sky goes green." He frowned at the arrow. "Where does it point?" "Down the slip, to where the boat goes out when nobody else will."

He paid for the gold leaf anyway, and she kept the old board for herself. By the next noon the rain had got into the paint of the new one, and her crooked letters had run into the gravel below the gutter, so anyone stepping off the kerb had to lower their head to read them, and the arrow still pointed at the sea.