Realism portrait of a bearded man with red blood splatter and the words Don't Open and Dead Inside tattooed on a calf.

Bearded man portrait with zombie and blood splatter

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A greyscale portrait of a bearded man looking to the side fills the centre of the leg, with a pale, decaying hand reaching up from below his chin. The words DON'T OPEN and DEAD INSIDE are written in bold black lettering above and below the portrait. Red ink splatters and drips behind the design, and the shading on the face is smooth and detailed.

Realism Calf Portrait Man Beard Zombie Hand Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward of Harrowgate Keep had nailed the cellar door shut the winter his brother went down the stair with a lamp and came back up without it. Since then the children of the valley were told the castle kept its own counsel, and nobody argued. Then Mabel Thorne, who had little sense and a great deal of patience, came up the hill with a crowbar on her shoulder and a heel of bread in her coat.

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Written across the lintel in tar, in letters taller than a man, were the words DON'T OPEN. Someone had added, smaller and later, DEAD INSIDE, and someone else had scratched that out and written it again, pressing harder. Mabel read them aloud to the crows. "Well," she said, "that's a warning, not a riddle."

The hinges gave with a sound like a cough. The steps were dry, and the air smelled of wet slate and something sweeter, like windfall apples left too long in the grass. At the bottom a man sat against a barrel with a beard grown down to his belt and his hands folded in his lap. He lifted his head slowly when the lamp reached him. His eyes were clear, and he was looking at the bread in her pocket.

He told her the mill had stopped because the grain had gone bad in the stores, and that he had been sealed down here with it so the rot would not climb into the valley. He asked for the bread. Mabel thought about the mill, and about her brother's empty sacks, and then she set the heel on the top step and bolted the door again from the outside. In the morning the crust was gone and the step was swept clean. She left the words where they were.