Traditional style flash drawing of a clawed glove hand with a banner reading Never Sleep, in red, teal and brown.

Clawed hand with Never Sleep banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a clawed hand with long, blood-tipped claws rising above a red glow. A pale yellow-green banner across the wrist reads NEVER SLEEP in black capitals. Bold black outlines and flat fills in brown, teal and red give it a classic flash sheet look.

Traditional Glove Claw Banner Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here has teeth, and the pass is no place for anyone who nods off by the fire. My grandmother told me this one on a night like this, with snow coming sideways over Cold Hallow Gap, and she made me say the last line back to her before she let me go to bed.

Keep reading

There was a glove that hung on a nail in the cobbler's shed at Brennock. It had four fingers of hammered copper and a palm stitched from old saddle leather, and the tips of its blades were filed red from the blood of every thief who had tried to take the cobbler's coin. Nobody bought it and nobody sold it. It simply hung there, and the cobbler's apprentice, a girl called Wenna, began to notice that the nail was always bare by morning.

She tried to stop it. She nailed the glove to the wall with three iron spikes, and by dawn the spikes lay in the straw, bent like wet reeds. She sat up all night with a lantern, counting her breaths, and when the owls went quiet she heard the leather creak above her head. She did not look up. She sang the ferryman's song her mother used to sing and kept singing until the sky went grey over the pass.

When her mother came in at noon, Wenna was asleep on the bench with the lantern cold beside her. The glove hung on its nail with its copper fingers spread wide and the red tips dry. Nobody in Brennock has ever been sure who it is that keeps the shed swept and the nail clean every night since. Now say it back to me, the last line, and then you may go to bed.