Black and grey engraving-style tattoo across a person's back, showing a crossbow, a noose, a snake, a hunter with a musket, a horned figure with a horn and a hound, with text lines.

Engraved collage of crossbow, noose and hunter on back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers most of the back, arranged as a collage of separate vignettes. Subjects include a crossbow with bolts, a noose, a snake, a uniformed figure with a musket, a horned figure blowing a horn beside a hound, and a skull-like mask at the upper left. Fine hatching and cross-hatching give the linework an etched, engraved look, and several lines of text are set among the images.

Traditional Back Arrow Snake Horn Mask Bird Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crossbow had been the Count's pride until the winter the forest turned against him. Every morning that January, Henrik Vos walked the edge of the beech wood with the bolts counted in his coat, because the Count had written in his ledger that a man who loses one bolt will lose the next. Vos had kept the ledger for nineteen years. He knew the hand that wrote it better than his own mother's, and he knew the sound of a horn in the trees, which was not the Count's horn, though it was blown in the Count's manner.

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On the ninth day he found the hound sitting at the stump where the old oak had come down. It was a grey brute with a leather collar stitched with the Count's initials, and it did not bark. Beside it stood a figure with two long horns curling out of its hat, lifting a brass horn to its mouth. The figure looked at Vos without alarm and said, in the flat tongue of the lowlands, that the Count had gone out the previous week and not come back, and that nobody would be paying the ledger men until the thaw.

Vos understood then that the bolts were not for deer. He lowered the crossbow he had been carrying and set it against the stump. The hound rose, shook itself, and walked off into the beeches without looking back, as if it had only been waiting for someone to read the terms. Vos took the ledger from his coat, opened it to the last page, and wrote one line in his own careful hand: returned, the hunt is paid, the forest keeps its count.