Hand-lettered black text reading too weird to live, too rare to die, with a flock of black bats, on a yellow background; a lettering design that could be used as a tattoo.

Lettering design with bats on yellow

Lettering · Colour · Flash

A black hand-lettered phrase reads TOO WEIRD TO LIVE TOO RARE TO DIE, set in uneven, brush-like strokes that vary in weight and stagger across the frame. Five or six small black bats in flight sit above and to the left of the words, balancing the composition. The artwork is solid black on a flat, plain yellow background with no shading.

Lettering Lettering Text Bat Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Maddox Teal kept the galley fire banked and the bats fed, and nobody aboard the Mercy Jane could agree which habit was the stranger one. The bats had come up the gangplank at Falmouth, five of them, and hung from the foresail like wet washing. The bosun swept at them with a broom. They went back to the sail as soon as he turned his head.

Keep reading

The captain wanted them thrown overboard. Maddox said a ship with bats in her rigging had never gone down in a squall, which was true only in the sense that nobody had tested it. The captain called him a soft-headed fool and went up the mainmast the next morning to look at a torn sail. He came down onto the deck with a snap the boy heard from the galley. The bats circled the captain's cot all night, and he lived, which the crew agreed was the weirder thing.

Off the Horn the sea came green over the bulwarks and lightning split the foremast. The stove went over. Maddox was flung against the iron rail, and the men counted him drowned before the watch changed. When he woke, his shirt was scorched and the five bats were folded on the hook above his bunk, wings wrapped tight like umbrellas. Nobody on the Mercy Jane ever again asked him why the bread came out warm after a gale.

He never explained it. He only told the boy, who asked every night, that a thing too strange for the sea to take had better keep its hands busy. Then he lit the stove, cut the loaf, and left the scraps on the sill for the bats, who came down in the dark and ate them without a sound.