Black and grey script lettering reading The Good Times Are Killing Me, with looping flourishes, across the ribs.

Script quote across the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a large script lettering tattoo reading The Good Times Are Killing Me, set in several staggered lines. The letters have bold, flowing strokes with looping flourishes and fine tails. The tattoo fills most of the frame against smooth skin on the side of the torso, with a blurred background.

Lettering Ribs Quote Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit yourself down, and mind the coal dust on that bench, because I'm going to tell you about Dai Wrenfield and the summer the Welfare Hall ran out of mild. He was a face worker at Tylorstown, which means he spent eight hours a shift on his knees in a seam no higher than a kitchen table, and he came up blacker than the pit pony's temper. Saturday nights he'd sit in the front row of the Welfare with a half of bitter, and Idris Pugh, who had three fingers and a grudge against the piano, would play the old hymns slow enough to make you weep for the money.

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Every Saturday Dai said the same thing to anyone within earshot. "Look at me, boyo. The good times are killing me." He said it the way you'd read out the price of bread. His wife Glenys would swat him with a tea towel and tell him the drink would finish him before the dust did, and he'd laugh until he coughed into his handkerchief, and we'd all laugh with him, because that was the arrangement.

The autumn the colliery shut, nobody laughed. Dai walked up to the top gate with his lamp still clipped to his cap and stood there looking down the dark like he was waiting for a shift that wasn't coming. Glenys found him at dusk. What he said to her that night she never repeated to a living soul, except to say it wasn't a joke.

The next Saturday the Welfare's whitewashed wall had a line painted across it in fresh letters, and the Lodge secretary made us all leave it up. Nobody ever found out who did the painting. I always thought it was Dai, sneaking in with a tin of lime and a steady hand, and I always thought he'd have liked to see the words lasting longer than the coal.