Traditional style colour tattoo of dental forceps gripping a tooth with a red drip, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forceps gripping a tooth on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pair of dental forceps or pliers with yellow, green and red fills, gripping a tooth with a small red drip beneath it. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills give it a classic traditional look. The skin fills most of the frame against a black and white checkered floor, with part of another faint line drawing at the right edge.

Traditional Calf Blood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs man at Newry had a face like a shut door and a toothache he would not admit to. He lifted my case onto the steel table, unclipped it, and laid the instruments out one by one as if they might go off. Brass, mostly, with the bite worn bright where a thousand jaws had been. He held up the big pair with the yellow handles, the ones Mr Crowther gave me in Bolton, and asked what in God's name a woman wanted with pliers in a car boot.

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Forceps, I said. Dental. I've drawn teeth in six counties for twenty-two years and never once been stopped at a border for it. He wanted proof. I told him the proof was in the mouth, and he could open his own for me if he liked. He didn't laugh. Behind him the radio was giving the weather for Dundalk, the kettle clicked off, and the clock above the door ticked louder than it had any right to.

Then he pressed a hand to his jaw and said, quite quietly, that the lower left had been going since Easter. I didn't say I'd told him so. I washed my hands in his sink, which I suspect was against regulations, and sat him on the plastic chair under the strip light. The tooth came out with one clean drop of red, the way they always do when the root has given up and the man has been brave about it too long. He spat into the paper cup I offered and watched it fill.

He let me through without another question. At the gate he pressed the tooth into my palm, wrapped in a scrap of tissue, and said I could keep it, since it was the only thing in the country he'd ever been glad to lose. I put it in the tin with the forceps, where it still rattles on the bends of the road to Armagh.