Black line drawing of a woman in an Art Nouveau arched frame, surrounded by skulls and snakes, with the word DEATH lettered at the base, shown as a tattoo design.

Art Nouveau woman with skulls and DEATH lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a woman with her hair swept up and flowing ribbons, set inside an arched, ornamented frame with interlaced patterns. She sits among a cluster of skulls and twisting snakes, with the word DEATH in a decorative serif at the bottom. The linework is uniform and bold, with flat white areas and no shading or colour.

Woman Skull Snake Flower Ribbon Lettering Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The printer's boy had been told the word twice before he believed it. Mr Halloran wanted the letters at the foot of the sheet to look like a headstone's, heavy and serifed, and he had already locked the forme when Ada Quill came down the back stairs of the Gilt Lantern with her shawl over one arm and ink on her thumb from the proof she had snatched off the bench.

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"Death sells tickets," she said, not unkindly. "People come to be frightened and then they dance because they were frightened. Nobody buys a waltz on a Tuesday. They buy the night they might not get again." The skulls in the design had come from the old prop box under the stage, and the snakes wound around her wrists because the Lantern's owner had once kept a real one in a tea chest and never explained why. The arched frame was copied from a chapel window that had burned in the spring, so the boy had spent a week inking gilt-coloured lines on paper that would never shine.

"Why does it matter what it says?" he asked, wiping his hands on his apron. She traced one of the ribbons on the proof with her inky finger, following it from her hair down past the stacked skulls, and it stopped exactly where the word began.

"Because the ribbons go somewhere," she said. "Look."

The poster went up on every hoarding from Leith Walk to the Grassmarket, black on cream, with no colour to lean on. On Saturdays the queue at the Lantern ran past the lettering, and the boy, sweeping the step, saw people stop under the word, read it aloud, and laugh as they went in.