Black lettering tattoo reading 'if you don't live for something you'll die for nothing' across the chest, set in a plain serif style.

Quote lettering across the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a block of black lettering across the upper chest or ribs, reading 'if you don't live for something you'll die for nothing' over four lines. The letters have solid black outlines with some grey shading and a slightly uneven, hand-applied look. The image is shown in a warm, close crop, with a plaid shirt open at the side and fingers holding the fabric.

Lettering Chest Quote Word Text

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 slate in the Inchkeil schoolroom still had the sentence on it the winter Mr Rennie copied it from an almanac, the letters pressed so hard they showed through three coats of dust. I thought it was the sort of thing grown men wrote when they wanted to look wise. My father hauled creels off the north skerry for twenty years and never once quoted anything, and I was ten before I understood the sentence had been meant for him.

Keep reading

Donal was the one who wanted off the island. At seventeen he had a ticket for the Tuesday ferry and a suitcase tied shut with baler twine, and on the Monday night he sat on the harbour wall beside me and said the island would keep us both until we were grey and then drop us in the sea with the rest of the rubbish. "If you don't live for something," he said, and then he laughed, because he could hear how it sounded in his own mouth. He did not finish the line. He did not need to. Mr Rennie's chalk had got into all of us.

The Tuesday ferry never sailed. The January gale took the pier and most of the boats, and by March there was nobody left on Inchkeil who could run the mail across to Ardvarrick except me and a borrowed engine. Donal stayed to help rebuild the slipway. He never said he had chosen anything. He just kept turning up at six with bread and a spanner, and I kept going out on the water.

Last week I copied the sentence onto the back of the mail ledger, the way Mr Rennie used to, and pinned it above the engine where the spray could not reach it. A visitor from the mainland read it aloud and asked whether I was the one who had lived for something. I told her I was the one who had stayed. She wrote it down wrong on her form, which seemed about right.