Black ink tattoo of a Deathly Hallows symbol with lettering arranged around it, across the middle of a person's back.

Deathly Hallows symbol with quotation on back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo covers the centre of a bare back, showing a triangle, a circle and a vertical line forming a Deathly Hallows symbol. Lines of text follow the curve of the circle and the edges of the triangle, reading 'Do not pity the dead, pity the living, and those who live without love', 'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good' and 'It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live'. The ink is solid black with clean, even linework, and the composition is centred on the back.

Lettering Geometric Back Deathly hallows Triangle Circle Text

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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

Nobody in Carrow Dale liked to say the name of the wood after dark, so when the tinker came up the lane at dusk with a cart that rattled like a sack of bones, my mother bolted the door and pretended she had not seen him. I watched through the gap in the shutter. He stopped where the lane splits into three beneath the oaks, and he called my name as though he had known it all my life.

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He laid three things on the wall for me to choose from: a ring of grey stone no bigger than a bread roll, a shawl of cloth so fine it might have been spun from cobweb, and a stick of holly wood polished smooth by a thumb. The stone, he said, was for people who could not put a grief down. The cloth was for hiding from anyone who wanted you back. The wood was for going wherever you pleased. My mother called from the kitchen that we had no money and no use for such rubbish, and the tinker only smiled at the shutter.

I took none of them. He seemed pleased, which annoyed me, and he told me that the ones who refuse are the ones who should keep an eye on the others. Then he turned his cart around and rattled back into the trees, and the lane ran on as if nothing had happened.

The ring sat on my windowsill for forty years. I never touched it. Each morning I walk past the oaks to the mill, do the work set out for me, and in the afternoons I steal the baker's windfalls and eat them on the wall, because the dead have had their turn and the living ought to be a little wicked now and then.