Black script tattoo reading 'You only live once' across the side of the torso, near the ribs.

Script quote tattoo on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black script tattoo reading 'You only live once' across the side of a torso. The letters have a fine, slightly tapered line with soft shading and a flowing, handwritten style. The image is in black and grey, with a white fabric edge at the bottom and a blurred background at the top right.

Lettering Ribs Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Livia, the carter who takes this tablet swears he will reach the inland road by dawn, but I have seen him drink, so you may receive these words a week late with a thumbprint of his sour wine on the corner. Forgive it. I am writing on the quay with the wax warmed by the sun, and the ship beside me, the Pallas Felix, is loading amphorae of Gaulish oil that smell like a bathhouse in July.

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You will say I have decided this in a rush, the way Father decided on the sea. Perhaps. But the stevedore Nico, who has lost two fingers to a hawser and gained the wisdom of an old priest, told me yesterday that a man who counts his days like coins will die a rich pauper. I laughed at him. Then I went home and counted my coins, there were only eleven, and I understood that he was right in the cruellest way.

So I have signed on for the run north to Massilia and then the open Ocean towards the grey island you once pretended to know on the map. The captain says the tin ports pay in silver. I have bought you a bronze hand mirror from a Greek with one good eye, and I have wrapped it in my spare tunic. Do not let the carter find it.

I scratched the phrase into the wax beneath my name, the way Nico cuts his tally marks, so you will know I meant it as a jest and not as a farewell. We only get the one turn on the rope. Keep the tablet. Smooth it flat when you have finished being angry with me, but not before.