Traditional-style flash design of a fist gripping a knife with red blood drips and a banner reading KILL 'EM ALL, shown on paper with no body placement.

Fist holding a bloodied knife

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A clenched fist with a shirt cuff rises from a banner reading KILL 'EM ALL and grips a knife with a red-stained blade. Three red blood drops fall beneath the blade. The outlines are bold and even, the skin and cuff are shaded in grey, and the blood is solid red on a cream paper background.

Traditional Fist Knife Blood Banner Lettering Cuff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council man wanted the banner down before the Saturday crowd. Maureen Tolley had painted it herself, KILL 'EM ALL in letters she'd copied from a gravestone in Cleethorpes, and she was not taking it down for a man in a lanyard. She held up her filleting knife, the one with the bone handle worn pale by thirty years of cod, and told him the words were about the gulls.

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The gulls had been robbing her trays since the spring. They came down off the harbour wall in a grey gang, took a whole plaice in one swoop and left her shouting at the sky. Her brother Terry said she ought to get a dog. Maureen said a dog would only want feeding, whereas a banner cost nothing but a tin of gold paint and a bit of nerve.

The turn came on a Tuesday. The gulls stopped coming. Every bird on the front had gone quiet, and the council man was back, not with a notice this time but with a box of frozen bait and a grin. He had been feeding them himself so the stall would look like it had no custom. Maureen looked at the banner, then at the box, and laughed so hard she had to sit down on her upturned crate.

She left the banner up. Next morning a single herring gull sat on the harbour rail and watched her lay out the cod, perfectly still, the way a man watches a stranger who has taken his seat. Maureen tossed it a scrap and said, not unkindly, that she would be having words with its mates.