Black and grey tattoo of a grim reaper with a scythe above a kneeling winged figure, placed on a man's chest.

Grim reaper and kneeling angel on chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A hooded grim reaper holds a scythe above a kneeling figure with feathered wings. The tattoo is built from smooth grey shading with dark areas in the robes and wings and lighter highlights on the skin of the figures. The design is centred on the upper chest and is shown against bare skin with a chain necklace at the top of the frame.

Chest Grim reaper Scythe Angel Wing Hood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the wind up here takes half of what I say and gives back the wrong half. You know the pass above Carrow Col? Nobody crosses it in winter now, and that is because of what happened the year the snow came early and sat on the road like a sleeping dog.

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The reaper came up that road every autumn with his hood pulled low and his scythe across his shoulder, and he never once hurried. Shepherds said you could hear him coming by the silence, the way the wind dropped and the goat bells stopped ringing. He had a long list and a long patience. The angel was sent to sit beside him, as they all are, to keep the book and close the eyes of whoever he had chosen. Her name was Imre, and she was young enough to still believe a thing written down could be kept.

She knelt on the cold stone every night with her wings folded damp, and she wrote the names of the shepherd's children in the book, one under another, so the reaper would have to read them before he took anyone. He never argued. He only said the list was not his to change. So she asked him for one thing: wait until the thaw. Let the last of the snow leave the col first. He sat on his heels beside her and studied the white for a long time, then said yes, and leaned the scythe against the cairn where it stayed.

The thaw came late that year. Her wings dried in the sun. When the first goat bells rang again over the pass, the reaper stood, took up his scythe, and walked back down the road the way he had come, without the book. Imre kept it on her knees until it was full. Every name in it is still there, and the valley has never once been short of a shepherd.