Traditional style tattoo design drawing of a dagger piercing a mauve heart, with grey banners reading I SAY TO DEATH NOT TODAY, on a grey textured background.

Dagger through heart with banners

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A flat drawing of a dagger piercing a heart, with two grey banners wrapped around the blade and heart. The banners carry the words I SAY TO DEATH and NOT TODAY in white hand-drawn lettering. The linework is dark and outlined, with simple flat fills, and the heart is the only coloured element, in a muted mauve, set against a grey mottled background.

Traditional Dagger Heart Banner Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on your knees among the runner beans at the Tollgate allotments, thumbing slugs off the leaves, when the man in the grey coat comes up the gravel path with his hat held against his chest. He is smaller than you expected and smells faintly of wet newspaper. He does not look at the beds. He looks at you, then at a clipboard, and says your name the way the council says it, as if it were a parcel left out in the rain.

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Tuesday, he says. There is a frost coming down off the moor, and your name is on the list for it. You tell him Tuesday is out of the question, because the squash are still under their fleece and the Ashworths owe you a barrow of manure. He consults the clipboard again. The page is damp and the ink has run, but your name is written in the same green pencil as the seed packets in the shed, and beneath it someone has underlined two words twice, as if the matter were open to discussion.

You bargain the way your mother bargained over fish. He may have you when the beans come down. He says beans never come down, they only stop being yours. So you offer him the whole August glut, a tub of rhubarb, the good folding chair from the shed. He sits on the water butt, which groans under him, and accepts the rhubarb. You take the twine from your pocket and bind the bean canes into a tight bundle, round and round, the way you would bind a letter you meant to keep. He watches without speaking.

In the morning the frost arrives exactly when he said it would, silver on the cloche lids and the pumpkin leaves. On the water butt sits a stripped rhubarb stalk, and beside it a pencil. On the clipboard page a line has been drawn through your name, and in the margin, in your own handwriting, someone has written not today. You go out with the fleece and tuck the squash in as though nothing has been settled at all.