Black lettering tattoo in a typewriter-style font reading "we live with the scars we choose" across the ribs, in a lettering style.

Quote tattoo on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a two-line quote in black typewriter-style lettering, reading "we live with the scars we choose", tattooed on the side of the torso below the ribs. The letters are solid black with soft grey edges and are evenly spaced and centred on the skin. The skin around the words shows some redness, and a black garment edge sits at the top of the frame against a plain light background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Word Text Typewriter font

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

Mr Okonedo had the Olympia on his bench since Tuesday, and the carriage still would not return. He had stripped it to the frame and laid the springs out on a tea towel in neat rows, like cutlery after a funeral. "Somebody hit this machine for a very long time," he told the girl who had carried it in under one arm. She was Mrs Hallam's granddaughter, and she had inherited the typewriter along with a tin of carbon paper and a temper nobody had ever managed to fix.

Keep reading

The bell had rung late for a month, and the bar stuck halfway through each line. Under the platen he found the worn places, where the lower-case e had printed so often it had thinned to a grey ghost, and the shift key sagged like a tired elbow. Pressed into the felt was a sentence he already knew from the sheets she had brought in with it: we live with the scars we choose. The grandmother had typed it to the council, to the gas board, to the vicar, and once, he suspected, to her own sister, always in the same stubborn capitals of memory.

He replaced the return spring, oiled the escapement and let the carriage travel home with a clean, decent note. He offered to polish away the marks on the keys, but the girl shook her head. Then she rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the machine, typed the sentence through once, and watched the e come out heavy, the way it always had.