Black lettering tattoo of the phrase 'if you don't live for something you'll die for nothing' in a serif lettering style across the side of the ribs, with a hand holding a plaid shirt.

Quote tattoo across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a four-line quote tattooed in black ink across the side of a person's torso, with the words set in a serif lettering style with slightly uneven weight. The lettering is centred on bare skin and the lines step slightly in from one another. A plaid shirt and two hands holding the fabric frame the tattoo, and the lighting is warm and soft.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Lettering Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your uncle's allotment has gone to couch grass and bindweed, and the council letter sits on the potting bench under a trowel, asking for the plot back by the end of March. You have come up the lane on a Tuesday with a flask and no plan, which is how he always said you should start anything. The gate still sticks at the second bar. You lift it the way he taught you, then shove.

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Beyond the runner bean canes, the shed door hangs open on one hinge. Pinned above the seed trays is a strip of card gone soft at the corners, the quote set out in his square capitals: IF YOU DON'T LIVE FOR SOMETHING, YOU'LL DIE FOR NOTHING. Underneath, in biro, someone has added a line in a looser, rounder hand, and it takes you a moment to recognise your own writing from the summer you were nine. Mine is the sweet peas. Don't let them die.

You remember the question you asked him that summer, kneeling in the same dirt with a watering can too heavy for your arms. He had laughed and said the beans, mostly, and then he had looked at you for a while before adding that you would do.

You kneel now, the flask forgotten on the path, and start working the bindweed out from the sweet pea row. Its white roots come away in long, stubborn ropes. The trowel handle is worn smooth to a grip that is not yours, and you hold it anyway. The council can have its letter until Friday. The peas have been waiting all winter for someone to come back and pull the weeds from their roots.