Realism style colour tattoo of a bladed claw glove with blood-dripping slashes above script reading Psalm 23:4, on the side of the ribs.

Bladed claw glove with Psalm 23:4 on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a metal-plated glove with four long curved blades extending from the fingertips, with dark red slash marks and dripping blood across the skin above it. The glove is shaded in tones of amber, orange and grey, with soft shadow beneath the hand. Black script lettering reading Psalm 23:4 sits below the glove on a grey shaded background.

Realism Lettering Ribs Glove Claw Blade Blood Script Psalm Bible verse Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up fouled on the third haul, a snarl of cod-end and cable that no knife on the Girl Adeline could cut, so Harrow fetched the glove from the locker beneath the wheelhouse. You know the one: a leather mitt riveted with brass studs, four steel blades welded to the fingertips, each curved like a sickle and ground until it sang. He made it for the nets, he said, and for nothing else, and you believed him until the cable went taut and the whole deck leaned.

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You work the blades through the ropes while the swell lifts the bow and drops it, spray hammering the back of your collar. A block snapped across the rail and caught the second mate's forearm, and the blood ran pink in the seawater sloshing across the boards, but nobody stops to look at it. The glove bites through the last strand and the net sags open, silver flicking out over the planks like coins spilled from a purse.

Back in Grimsby, Harrow sits in the wheelhouse with a tin-cased Bible open on his knee and taps the page with a blunt finger. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. He reckons the psalm is about the glove, not the Lord, and he won't be argued out of it. You don't argue. You're too busy counting how many fingers you have left.

That evening you hang the glove on its nail above the sink in your mum's back kitchen. The blades drip seawater onto the lino, slow and steady, and through the window the dock lights come on one by one over the grey Humber. The verse is still in your head when you finally switch off the bulb.