Two side-by-side photos of a lettering tattoo on the inner wrist reading too WEIRD to LIVE and too RARE to DIE, in black ink.

Too weird to live and too rare to die on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs show the inner wrist and part of the hand, with a tattoo of the phrase "too WEIRD to LIVE" on the left and "too RARE to DIE" on the right. The letters use a serif typeface with mixed capitals, rendered in dark ink with solid, even fills. A vintage sepia filter and grain give the photographs a faded, greyscale look, with the text set diagonally across the wrist.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Phrase Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the bindery stank of glue again tonight, and I stayed late because the Harrow Street order was due by morning and Mrs Quayle wants her ledgers sewn with the old linen thread, not the cheap stuff she calls modern. I found your postcard tucked inside the spine of a Victorian almanac I was repairing. Someone had used it as a bookmark for forty years. The picture on the front is the Clock Tower at Dunmere, the one that stopped the winter you left, and on the back you wrote only two lines, too weird to live and too rare to die, with no name and no date, just the lamp-black capitals you always made when you were angry or pleased with yourself.

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I laughed out loud, alone with the press, and then I didn't. Mother used to say that about you, that you were too strange for a town like ours, and I took it as an insult for years. Tonight it sounded more like a dare. I walked the postcard down to the canal at midnight and held it under the lamp at the bridge, and the words stood up off the card the way they used to on your wrist when you held your hands out to the fire and showed me the ink. Nobody else in the family would have found that funny.

I am posting this to the address on the postmark, which is probably wrong by now. If you come back, the bindery key is under the blue tin by the step. The almanac is nearly finished. I have left the last signature open so you can sew it yourself, the way you promised you would when we were boys and the world was still a thing we meant to take apart and put back together. Your sister, Ines.