Colour tattoo of a dark cauldron with green bubbling brew, a banner reading DEAD MAN'S TOE and a campfire, placed on the outer thigh.

Cauldron with Dead Man's Toe banner on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A black cauldron sits over a campfire of orange flames and crossed logs, with green bubbling liquid and wispy green steam rising from it. A pale banner wraps around the pot bearing the words DEAD MAN'S TOE in black capitals, and small sparkles and a pale feather-like shape sit beside it. Bold black outlines define the forms, with purple shading on the cauldron and soft colour fills across the green and orange elements.

Traditional Thigh Steam Sparkle Campfire Log Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your umbrellas up, the lot of you, and mind the drip off the awning, for this tale wants dry ears and a bit of patience. Who here has ever bought a bottle from Nan Hebden's stall at the back of the fish market? No hands? Then you've been spared the smell of her cauldron, which I will describe whether you care to hear it or not.

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Forty winters she ran that pitch under a sheet of tarred canvas, and every October she set the iron pot on three crossed logs at the edge of the harbour and fed it with whatever the tide gave up. Mostly it gave up crab shells and bad news. One grey morning, the year the Alder brothers went down with the Gannet, it gave up a single grey toe wrapped in weed, and the widow Coyle came to Nan's stall with her coins knotted in a sock and asked what a body could do with such a thing.

Nan said nothing could be done with a toe, but a brew could be made of one, and the steam of it would tell the truth to whoever breathed it. She stirred for three nights while the rain came sideways off the estuary, and the liquid turned a green so bright it lit the underside of the awning. Frost stars rose off it and hung in the air, and the banner she tied around the pot read the only name she thought fit for it.

Widow Coyle drank a thimble at dawn and told the sea exactly where her husband's debts lay hidden, and the bank in Hull had its money back by Friday. That is the story, and the bottle on Nan's shelf is the last of it. Mind, if you buy one, don't ask whose toe it was. Nan never told, and the rain has a way of carrying names out to sea.