Dotwork drawing of a stern gorilla wearing a military helmet with bullets on the band and the words Beware the imposter of man, in black and white.

Gorilla in a military helmet with stippled shading

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stippled drawing of a gorilla's head wearing a military-style helmet with a rounded brim and chinstrap. The helmet band holds a row of bullets and the words BEWARE THE IMPOSTER OF MAN in hand-lettered capitals. Shading is built from fine black dots on white paper, giving the fur and wrinkled face a textured, tonal finish.

Dotwork Helmet Lettering Monkey

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The helmet had come down the ridge in a flood, rolled bottom-up against a root below the old mortar pit, and Ruben found it the spring the trucks stopped. The rim was dented in two places and the chinstrap had rotted, but the band still held its row of brass cartridges, bright as the day someone had threaded them. He put it on, because the sun was hard and his skull was thin with age, and the weight settled over his brow like a judgement.

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For a long season he kept it on while he walked the boundary stones. The men who came after the war came with poles and string and pale folded maps. They measured the river, then the hillside, then the bones of the hillside, and they talked of roads the way water talks of falling. Ruben watched from the fig trees. When they nailed a yellow board to his best tree, he took a stub of charcoal from the cooking fire and wrote across the band of the helmet in the careful capitals his mother had taught him for marking goats: BEWARE THE IMPOSTER OF MAN. Then he went to sleep in the ferns, certain of nothing except that a warning ought to be written down before it is needed.

The surveyors read it. One of them, a boy with a sunburnt nose who had only come for the wages, sounded out each word aloud, slowly, the way children read signs they do not trust. The others laughed, then stopped laughing. The boy rolled up his string and walked back down the track without the rest of them, and the next morning the yellow board was lying face down in the mud.

Ruben still wears the helmet when it rains. Water pools in the dents and runs off the cartridges in small bright threads, and the charcoal letters have softened into the grey of the metal, legible only to the birds that land on the brim to drink.