Black and grey traditional tattoo of two crossed revolvers above a ribbon banner reading Don't Tread On Me, on the lower back.

Crossed revolvers with Don't Tread On Me banner

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two revolvers cross in an X shape, with their grips angled outwards and barrels meeting at the centre. Below them, a ribbon banner with curled ends carries the words DON'T TREAD ON ME in serif capitals. The tattoo uses black outlines and grey shading for the metal and ribbon, with soft gradients on the grips and folds, and it sits against plain skin with no colour ink.

Traditional Back Revolver Banner Ribbon Lettering Gun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the pair wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of your grandfather's sea chest the week the last ferry stops running from Hallin. The grips are worn pale where his palms went, and rust has fused the barrels at the join, so they lie crossed like tongs that never learned to let go. Your mother says they were never loaded in her lifetime. Your gran says nothing at all, which on Hallin means she knows exactly what they were for.

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What they were for is the path. Since spring, Mr Dunning's company has run a new fence along the cliff track down to the shingle, with a padlocked gate and a board that reads PRIVATE in letters as thick as a thumb. Your family has gathered winkles and dulse on that shingle since before the lighthouse. You spend three evenings with a tin of oil and a rag, working the cylinders until they turn with a sound like a clock being wound.

On the Saturday you walk up the track with the revolvers in a flour sack, feeling foolish, and find Dunning's man on an upturned bucket by the gate, eating a pie out of its paper. He looks at the sack, then at you, and laughs until he has to wipe his eyes. You don't open it. You lay the pair on the top bar of the gate, crossed, the way your grandfather once laid them on the kitchen table to end an argument, and you tell him the shingle belongs to whoever walks it at low water.

By the time the tide turns, the man has gone to telephone his employer, and the padlock swings loose on its chain. You walk down through the gap in the dusk. Behind you the revolvers stay where you left them, rust blooming gently on the steel, and below you the sea comes in over the stones one wave at a time, smoothing away every footprint you didn't make.