Black and grey tattoo of a fishing reel with a rod running down the leg, shaded in a semi-realistic style with bold outlines.

Fishing reel and rod on a leg

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large fishing reel sits on the leg with a rod extending down the side of the limb. The reel has a textured drum, a central spool and the word MONSTER engraved on its face, rendered with bold outlines and layered grey shading. The image is a close-up photograph with the tattoo filling most of the frame against a pale bed sheet.

Realism Thigh

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Duke of Harrowmere wanted his reel named after the fish that had broken him, so I cut the word MONSTER into its face with a graver my master had sworn never to lend me. He said the letters were too small for what the beast had done. I told him the reel was not made for shouting, only for keeping hold.

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We had built it from ash and bronze in the autumn, the drum ribbed like a waterwheel so the water could not sing through it, and wound it with three hundred yards of horsehair line. The fish came up out of the Sallow Deeps in the drought year, grey as a barrow stone, and took the line straight down past the lilies. For two days the Duke's men tried to haul it in. The reel hummed in its bracket like a struck bell and the handle smoked under my palm, and every time I thought the line had reached its end, a little more came back to us out of the dark water.

On the third morning the Duke came down to the jetty in his nightshirt and ordered me to cut it. I refused, because a reel that has been cut is only a wheel with nothing left to do. Instead I eased the brake and let the drum run. The fish ran with it, out past the reeds, until the ribs of the drum blurred and the light through them ran over the water like the spokes of a sun. When the line finally went slack, the reel kept turning, empty and bright, and the Duke stood on the jetty and watched it until it stopped.