Small black typewriter-style lettering reading mad to live on the side of a ribcage, in a fine lettering style.

Mad to live lettering on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the side of a torso showing the words mad to live in small black serif lettering with a typewriter look. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, in solid black ink with no shading or colour. The text sits horizontally across the ribs, with a white bikini top and strap and a sunlit outdoor background at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Quote Word Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Walter, the paper has finally let me go, which they say is a kindness, since the new editor wants photographs of cats doing things and I have only ever known how to write about tides and tax. I am sending you the last thing I typed on the Olivetti before the carriage jammed for good. It is two words I could not fit into the obituary column, so I have stuck them in your envelope where you will find them easier than I did.

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You will remember that the old machine swallowed its R in 1979 and I never bothered to replace it. Every word with an R in it now comes out looking like a shrug. That is why I had to write around the one word that mattered most, and why the phrase came out as it did: mad to live, with the spacing gone crooked where the e and the v kept sticking together. I wanted to tell the young woman at the Harbour Street shop that it was a mistake, but she only said the lettering was meant to look like something tapped out at midnight, so I let her have it.

Do not come to the leaving do on Thursday in your good suit. Bring the spare ribbon instead, the red and black one, and we will sit by the sea wall and argue about whether a sentence can be wrong if it is typed straight. I think it can. I think it can be wrong and still be the only true thing on the page.

Yours in ink and salt, Harold.