Black hand-lettered tattoo reading TOO WEIRD TO LIVE TOO RARE TO DIE with a small bat above it, on the side of the ribs.

Lettering quote with a bat on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of the words TOO WEIRD TO LIVE TOO RARE TO DIE, written in uneven hand-drawn capitals with a small bat silhouette above the first line. The linework is solid black with no shading, set against pale skin at the side of the torso. A patterned top with red triangles is visible on the left edge of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Bat Quote Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, pull your collars up, the rain's coming sideways off the Tanners' Yard, and you'll want to hear this under the awning. Mind the puddle by Gert's fish stall. There was a man called Absalom Pike who sold clocks on Scarrow Street every Thursday, and every clock he sold ran a minute slow, because he said time was a thing you were owed, not a thing you were given.

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One wet March a girl came up the market with a cardboard box full of air holes. Inside was a bat, folded like a soaked glove, one wing torn on a fence wire. She'd carried it from the railway arch under her coat. Absalom looked at the bat, then at her, and said, "That's too weird to keep in a box and too rare to lose, so we'll have to be clever about it." He mended the wing with a scrap of green silk from his waistcoat lining, and the bat hung off the edge of his clock shelf for three weeks, blinking at the customers and making them buy things they didn't need.

The girl came back every Thursday to check on it, and Absalom started setting one clock at a time to the true hour so she could see the bat's shadow line up with it. Nobody else noticed. Nobody ever does.

When the wing healed, the bat went up over the canal at dusk, a black stitch against the cloud. Absalom wound every clock on the stall to the right time that evening, just once, and then he let them all run slow again, same as always. But he kept one back, the cracked brass one by the till, and that one still ticks true, if you know where to listen.