Black and grey realism tattoo on an upper arm showing a hooded grim reaper with a scythe above a kneeling winged angel, with script banners.

Grim reaper and kneeling angel on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hooded grim reaper holding a scythe sits above a kneeling winged angel, with two script banners running between the figures. The shading is black and grey, with soft tonal gradients on the robes, wings and background and fine outlines defining the forms. The design fills the upper arm, with the reaper at the shoulder and the angel towards the elbow.

Realism Upper arm Grim reaper Scythe Angel Wing Banner Script Hood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got under the front door again by the time Ada Pascoe found the sketch, pinned face down beneath the brass tray where lodgers left their keys. She turned it over with one damp fingertip. A hooded figure leaned on a scythe against a rising moon, and below him an angel knelt over a heap of shingle, wings folded round its bowed head. Across the top someone had written WITHOUT DARKNESS in careful capitals. Across the bottom, in the slanting hand she knew from the breakfast slips, ran the words THERE CAN BE NO LIGHT.

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Mr Aske had taken the back room at the end of October, paid a month in advance in coins and never once asked for a hot water bottle. He drew at the kitchen table after she had banked the range, always the same two figures, trying the hood one way and then another. On the Thursday she set his tea down beside the pencils and asked which of the two was meant to stay. He took a long time to answer. His brother had gone out on the Gull after the storm warnings, he said, and the boat came back without him. He did not say which of the figures he believed he was.

Ada said nothing about the candle he kept lit in the window, or how the beam from the point swept across his door every eleven seconds and found him awake each time. That night she carried the drawing up to her own room and propped it against the mirror. By morning the sea had gone to pewter, and she studied the scythe, which the artist had laid across the angel's wings rather than swinging it at anything, and understood that the drawing was not finished.

She took her good pencil from the dresser drawer and, very lightly, sketched a small lamp in the angel's upturned hands. Then she went downstairs, pinned the page beside the window where the beam would cross it at dusk, and put the kettle on for two.