Black and grey leg sleeve tattoo of a horned beast, a winged demon and writhing nude figures running from the thigh down to the calf.

Black and grey demonic leg sleeve on thigh and calf

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A long leg sleeve shows a horned, goat-like creature crouching over a nude figure at the top of the thigh, with a small winged demon and a gaunt, skeletal figure further down. Lower on the calf, several contorted figures are gathered together. The work uses dense black and grey hatching and fine linework with strong contrast, and the composition runs vertically along the leg against a plain stone wall.

Thigh Calf Demon Goat Skeleton Monster Leg sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthlow would say the goat's name aloud, so Tomas called it the Tallyman, the way his grandmother did when she settled debts on the fish quay. It climbed out of the harbour mud each spring when the herring turned, horns first, then the long grey shoulders, and it went looking for whoever had cheated the sea. Most years it found a drunk or a debtor and that was the end of the matter.

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That spring it came for Uncle Aled. He had stripped a drowned sailor of his boots on the slipway and sold them in Penzance for four shillings, and the Tallyman had been counting ever since. Tomas saw it first from the upper window, a small winged thing hopping ahead on the wet cobbles like a cat with a grudge, then a gaunt grey fisherman with the sea showing through his ribs, and last the dead crowd from the churchyard, pressed together and tugging at one another's hair as they came up the steps.

Tomas took the lantern and his own boots, which were too small and had been his father's, and went down to the quay. The goat did not look at his face. It looked at his feet, then at the lantern, then at the ledger under its arm, and it opened the book to a page with a single name already inked. Tomas knelt and unlaced the boots and held them out across the stones, because the sea always takes its tithe from those who offer.

In the morning Aled was found asleep in the net loft with his head on a coil of rope and both his feet bare. On the bottom step of the slipway the tide had left a pair of small boots, laced neatly and full of water. Tomas never told anyone what he had given, and the Tallyman, when it came back the next spring, did not climb past the second step.