Traditional style tattoo of a black coffin with a cross, a scythe and two flowers, with a banner reading Kill the hate within me, on a thigh.

Coffin, scythe and cross on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A coffin with a pale cross on its black lid sits at the centre of the design, with a curved scythe arching over the top left and a banner across the middle reading KILL THE HATE WITHIN ME. Two flowers with teal and red petals and green leaves frame the lower and upper right of the coffin. Bold black outlines, solid black fills and orange and red accents give it a classic flash look, shown in a close photograph on a thigh.

Traditional Thigh Coffin Cross Scythe Banner Flower Rose Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the coffin went out of the shop this morning with the scythe fixed along its top corner, and Father swore at the hinge for the best part of an hour before he would let the cart take it. Mrs Pryce ordered it for her husband, who spent forty years not speaking to his brother over a boundary wall. She wanted the banner, she said, so the whole parish could read it on the way to the church.

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Father painted the words himself on the ribbon, letters no taller than my thumb, and then sat back on his stool and said the trouble with hate is that it keeps far better than the man who carries it. He mixed the teal for the flowers from the bluebottle dye Mother used on the church linen, and he would not let me touch the red tin, not even to lift the lid. The lid itself he gilded along the edges with the last of the good leaf, which I think was a mistake, because Mrs Pryce looked at it for a long time and then asked if it could be made a little plainer.

She came back at dusk with the brother's wife, the two of them stood at the bench in their black gloves, and neither one said a word about the banner. Then the brother's wife picked up the spare cross Father had cut from the offcuts and turned it over in her hands. Nobody told her it was meant for the old man's grave, and nobody needed to.

Come home for Sunday, and bring your good chisels. The scythe is still leaning against the wall where the cart left it, and I have not yet decided whether it belongs to the coffin or to us. Your loving sister, Nell.