Traditional style tattoo of a grey tombstone with green grass and red shading, reading GET BUSY LIVIN' OR GET BUSY DYIN', on a limb.

Tombstone with GET BUSY LIVIN' slogan

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grey tombstone with a scrolled top sits between green grass tufts, with a red shadow behind it, and the words GET BUSY LIVIN' and OR GET BUSY DYIN' are set across the stone and below it. The design uses bold black outlines, flat grey fills on the stone and lettering, and simple flat green and red accents. The tattoo is centred on the skin with the text running across the full width of the composition.

Traditional Lettering Other Tombstone Grass Slogan Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper has been on about the headstone since the Dogger Bank, and by the time the nets come up heavy with grey cod you have stopped arguing and started counting. Ruth Fenwick's husband bought it for a joke, he says, a slab of Aberdeen granite cut for a man who never got round to dying, and it sat in the chandlery yard at Peterhead for three winters with a tuft of sea thrift growing out of its base. You think he is making it up. Dougie Tennant makes most things up, but he keeps tapping the rail with his gutting knife as though setting a beat to it.

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Then the hydraulic winch seizes with a crack like a dropped spar, and the whole crew freezes except you. Somebody swears. Dougie comes down off the step, pushes his oilskin hood back and looks at the stalled drum the way some men look at a bad debt. 'Get busy livin',' he says, not quite to you, and reaches for the spanner. You do not understand the joke until his hands are black to the wrist and the cable is running again, and the rest of the crew are laughing at the cod, not at you. The slogan is the sort of thing you would find on a bar mirror, but out here it lands like a sum that finally adds up.

By the time the fleet ties up at dawn, the sky is the colour of wet slate. Someone has chalked a crude stone on the fish market wall, and the gulls are already perched along its top edge. Dougie walks past it with his hands in his pockets. He stops, reads the second line out loud, and then looks at you for a long moment.

'Go on, then,' he says. 'Dying's not going anywhere. It'll keep till Tuesday.'