Black lettering tattoo reading Too Weird To Live Too Rare To Die with small bird silhouettes, placed on the side of the ribs.

Too weird to live quote on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black ink tattoo on the side of a torso, showing the phrase Too Weird To Live Too Rare To Die set in hand-drawn, brush-like capitals with a few small bird silhouettes above the first line. The letterforms use bold, solid black fills with ragged, expressive edges and no shading or grey tones. The text runs vertically down the ribs against plain pale skin, with a dark tiled floor visible at the lower left.

Lettering Ribs Text Quote Bird Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harrow Court has been dead since March, so you carry the shopping up seven flights in a bag that cuts into your fingers. Mrs Okafor on four wants her meter read before the men come on Thursday. Mr Dunmore on six wants you to stop feeding the pigeons off his sill, and you tell him the pigeons have never once asked your permission.

Keep reading

At dusk they gather on the roof parapet, a dozen grey birds shuffling along the concrete like men waiting for a bus that is never coming. Sometimes they lift all together, a dark sheet shaken off a line, and for a second the whole block seems to breathe out. Your brother rang from Leeds last week to say he has booked himself in for a line of words he saw online, with birds flying above it. You laughed until he hung up on you, then felt stupid for laughing.

The council man arrives on Friday with a clipboard and a lanyard that says Regeneration. He tells you Harrow Court comes down in the spring, and he says the word demolition the way a weatherman says drizzle. You stand beside him on the roof while the sun goes orange on the glass of the towers beyond. After a while you ask him whether the pigeons will be rehoused too, and he laughs, then sees you aren't joking.

That night you take a marker from the kitchen drawer and go down the stairs one floor at a time, the empty bread bag over your shoulder. On the steel doors of the dead lift, under the phone number that has been there since before you moved in, you write in capitals that wobble and run: TOO WEIRD TO LIVE, TOO RARE TO DIE. Nobody will read it before the wrecking ball does. You write it anyway, then go back up to feed the birds.