Black lettering tattoos reading 'Too weird to live' and 'Too rare to die', with small bat outlines, on the backs of two thighs above denim cut-off shorts.

Quote lettering across both thighs

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the backs of two thighs wearing denim cut-off shorts. Each thigh carries bold black hand-lettered text, reading 'Too weird to live' on the left and 'Too rare to die' on the right, with small bat silhouettes scattered among the letters. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the frame is taken from behind, with the denim and a pale background filling the rest of the image.

Lettering Thigh Quote Lettering Bat Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stool closer to the embers, because the bats won't come out until the windfalls start to smell of cider, and then you'll want to be watching. My grandmother kept the orchard at Pennick Hill, forty trees of Bramley and Ashmead's Kernel, and she always said the bats were the only honest workers on the place. They ate the moths that laid their eggs in the apples, and all they asked in return was a dark loft in the old cider house and to be left alone.

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One August a lad came up the lane with a battered suitcase and a sunburnt neck, sent from the town to help with the picking. His name was Tobias Vane, and he was too clever for the work and too quick with his mouth. By the second week the other pickers had decided he was too strange to keep. They said he talked to the bats. He did. He told them about the tram stops in Lisbon he'd never seen and the sea he'd never swum in, and they hung from the rafters and listened as if he were reading them the banns.

Then the wind turned in late September and the pickers woke to find every ladder knocked flat, the far rows stripped bare in a straight line, as though something had combed the fruit off the branches. Grandmother sat up with a paraffin lamp. Near dawn Tobias walked out of the orchard with a sack of Kernels on his back and a black spiral of bats circling his head. He said the moths had taken a debt from the trees and he had gone to settle it. Nobody asked him what he meant. Grandmother simply hung a lantern in the loft that night, and she hung one there every August after, for as long as I can remember.