Red biohazard symbol with three arrows through it and the words Fight the Dead and Fear the Living in black lettering, tattooed on an arm.

Fight the dead, fear the living biohazard arm tattoo

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red biohazard symbol with dripping, blood-like details sits at the centre of the design, with three arrows with blue fletching passing through it. The words FIGHT THE DEAD above and FEAR THE LIVING below are set in bold black block lettering. The solid red, blue and black ink is crisp against the skin, and the design fills the frame.

Lettering Forearm Arrow Slogan Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dead came up the Carrow pass in February, when the snow still held a man's weight in the mornings. Old Mair Tenant watched them from the hut window with her bow across her knees. There were eleven that year, grey-faced and slow, following the smell of the valley road. She did not go down to them. Her grandfather had told her the dead only wanted the warm, and the warm would come to them soon enough.

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The living were the trouble. In March a pedlar came up with a cart and two boys, and he had a sack of coins and a cough that smelled of sickness. He asked for the hut and the gate key. Mair gave him bread and told him to go back down the way he came. He laughed and said the valley had been emptied by the dead, so the pass belonged to whoever could pay the toll. She answered that the pass belonged to whoever could keep it.

That night the pedlar's boys crept out to the gate with a lantern. Mair heard the chain and went out with three arrows, the blue-feathered ones her brother had fletched before he went down to the lowland towns and never came back. She loosed one into the post beside the boy's hand and one through the lantern. The third she kept. The pedlar's men lost their nerve in the dark and went back down the road, and the dead, drawn by the light, followed them into the snow.

In spring the hut was still standing and the gate still locked. Mair drew a ring on the post with ash and goat's blood, a mark for those who came with sickness in their mouths. Travellers who saw it turned back without being asked. The dead she dealt with as she always had, one at a time, slowly, with her back to the wind. The living she trusted least of all.