Black and grey traditional sleeve on a forearm and upper arm, featuring a tiger head, an eagle, a feathered chief, a snake and roses.

Black and grey traditional sleeve with tiger, eagle and

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Several arms are shown together, covered in a full sleeve of bold traditional tattoos. Motifs include a tiger head, an eagle, a feathered chief face with an eye, a star-filled shield, a female portrait, a coiled snake, roses and an all-seeing eye within a pyramid. The linework is heavy and the shading is solid black with grey tones, set against a black and white photograph.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Tiger Eagle Eye Star Shield Woman Snake Rose Pyramid Sleeve Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach Gallows Gap at dusk, when the shale has started sliding under the snow and the only lamp for miles is the one in the toll hut. Nan Pryce keeps the book there. She has one rule about the eagle on the cairn above the road: it is never fed. You learn this in your first hour, when you offer it a heel of bread and she snatches the crust from your fingers and feeds it to the stove instead.

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Tonight the drovers are late. You sit by the fire and listen for their bells while Nan talks about the snake that lives in the sluice below the road. It comes up onto the flat stones by the door on warm evenings, coiled and patient, the colour of old pewter. Nobody kills it. The tiger the shepherds swear walks the ridge is a different matter; they say it follows the smell of tallow. Above the door a painted eye watches the road. Nan says the man who painted it wanted to know who was coming, not to be seen doing the looking.

At midnight the bell rings four times and then stops. You take the lantern down the steps and find the road white and empty, except for a lad in a patched coat standing where the cart tracks split, holding a drover's bell without its clapper. He asks whether the toll has been paid for him. You say you do not know his name. He says that is the point of the book. You open it, and the only entry on the page is in Nan's hand, dated forty years back: one star, paid in full.

At dawn there is frost on the lintel in the shape of a rose, and the eagle has left the cairn for the first time anyone can remember. Nan is at the table with her tea, not looking up. Ask her about the lad and she will tell you the pass has been keeping him a long time, and that you have been very kind to take his shift.