Black ink typewriter-style lettering reading 'To live is the rarest thing' on the left side of a person's ribs, with a dark garment pulled up beside it.

Quote lettering on the ribs in black ink

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small black tattoo of the words 'To live is the rarest thing' set across two lines on the side of the ribcage. The letters use a thin, typewriter-style serif with crisp solid linework and no shading. The skin tone is pale and the background is a dark fabric draped over the upper body, with a hand visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Quote Word Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at St Aldwyn's kept a biscuit tin under the sluice-room sink, and nobody on the wards knew it was there. Ada Pell had started it the winter her mother moved into the home on Larkfield Road. She found the first slip in the cardigan of a man from Bed Nine, folded so small it could have been a receipt. It had been typed on a machine with a sticky e, and the letters crowded together like children on the stairs.

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Sister Okonedo knew the machine. A grey typewriter had sat in the day room for thirty years, and the old men on Four had used it to write letters to people who never wrote back. When the ward was refitted it went to a skip, but somebody rescued it, and the men went on typing their slips, one line each, then folded them into their pockets before they went down to theatre or didn't come back up. Ada gathered them as if they were lost property, which in a way they were. By spring there were forty-one.

The one she kept coming back to read 'To live is the rarest thing', the e jammed on live and the full stop pressed so hard it had torn the paper. Nobody had signed it. She asked the day staff who had been in Bed Nine that week and got a shrug and a list of names, none of which fitted, because there was no handwriting, only the machine.

At four one morning, with the corridors gone soft and grey, she carried the typewriter out of its cupboard, wound a fresh sheet into the roller and typed her own line beneath the others: 'Ada Pell, porter, on duty.' Then she folded it small, slid it into her overall pocket and went to see whether the lift was still stuck between floors.