Close-up of the phrase live a little in small black serif lettering on the side of a person's ribs, with a dark-nailed hand resting above it.

Live a little lettering on the side ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads live a little. in lowercase black serif lettering with a full stop at the end, set on the side of the torso below the arm. The linework is clean and solid, with no shading or colour, and the text sits in the centre of the frame against pale skin. A dark fabric covers the left edge, and a hand with dark nail polish rests at the top.

Lettering Ribs Text Phrase Hand Typewriter font

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

The typewriter came off the back seat of Uncle Teddy's Ford with a sheet of carbon still rolled inside it, and I spent the first night on the Sallow Wells road reading what he'd left in the case. Forty years of letters, each addressed to a woman in Barstow who never wrote back, each typed on the same black machine with an e that sat a hair too high.

Keep reading

Every letter ended the same way. He signed off with a line of three small words, then a full stop, as if he'd been told not to say more than he meant. I read them by the headlights while the engine ticked, mile markers sliding past like the gaps in a Morse message I couldn't finish.

The road gave me nothing but heat shimmer and a diner that had been shut since 1979. Behind it, on a fence post, someone had nailed a strip of torn cardboard bearing those same three words, the paint still bleeding in the wind. Somebody had been out here before me, saying the thing he couldn't say to anyone's face.

I sat on the bumper with the machine on my knees and fed in a clean sheet. The first key stuck, then freed. I typed the phrase, tore the paper, and pinned it beside the old card, then drove east with the window down and the carriage bell ringing out over the sand.