Two side by side sepia photos of black ink lettering on the inner wrists, reading too WEIRD to LIVE and too RARE to DIE in a plain serif style.

Too weird to live and too rare to die wrist script

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two photographs side by side of the inner wrists, each carrying a line of black serif lettering. The left wrist reads too WEIRD to LIVE and the right reads too RARE to DIE, with the words set in mixed capitals and staggered across the skin. The heavy sepia filter and grain soften the linework, and the ink appears in black and grey tones.

Lettering Forearm Text Phrase Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steak had gone back to the galley three times, each time a little greyer at the edges, so on the fourth night you didn't ask Ruddock what he wanted. You took the pan off the hob before the fat had finished spitting, laid the fillet on the ticket rail, and carried it up the companionway with your thumb pressed hard against the rim of the plate.

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He was sitting under the lamp in the wardroom with his cuffs rolled to the elbow, the way he always sat when the weather had been bad. He looked at the blood pooling beside the meat, then at you, and something in his face loosened. "Too weird to live," he said, tapping the table, "too rare to die." It was a joke the old cook used to make before the old cook went ashore at Valparaíso and never came back, and nobody aboard had said it since.

You stood there longer than you should have. The ship rolled, the cutlery slid two inches and stopped. Ruddock cut into the steak, watched it bleed, and ate the first mouthful with his eyes shut.

Later, when the plates were stacked and the galley had gone quiet, you took the chalk from its nail and wrote the phrase on the bulkhead beside the old cook's, in your own careless capitals. Then you turned down the lamp and let the sea do the rest.