Black and white photo of a muscular man's back with a large grim reaper tattoo with a scythe, arched lettering reading Sons of Anarchy and California, and arm tattoos.

Grim reaper and lettering across a back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man flexes both arms above his head, showing a large back tattoo of a hooded grim reaper holding a scythe, with a skull face and a round object at its side. Arched lettering reads Sons of Anarchy above the figure and California below it. The shading is in black and grey with soft gradients, and the arm and shoulder tattoos are partly visible at the edges of the frame.

Lettering Back Shoulder Upper arm Grim reaper Skull Scythe Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clock on the tow truck's dashboard had stopped at ten to midnight again, and Dom Pardo kept tapping the glass as if that would change its mind. We were parked on the bluff above Ventura harbour, engine ticking, the sea breathing grey below the cliff. His father had driven this truck for thirty years on the coast road between Oxnard and the Santa Clara cutoff, and he had left it to Dom with one rule: never take a call after midnight unless the caller says the word harvest.

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"Nobody says harvest," I said. "Somebody just did," Dom said, and the radio crackled with a voice like wet gravel. A woman at the pier diner, cold coffee and a dead engine in the car park. She wanted the old green sedan taken to the scrapyard in Port Hueneme, the keys under the mat, and no questions. Dom looked at the work sheet, then at me. The name on it was his father's, and the date was tomorrow.

We drove down the bluff with the headlights sweeping over the palms. At the diner the sedan sat alone, its doors open and the back seat full of sand. Taped inside the rear window was a sun-bleached card that read CLOSED FOR GOOD. Dom hitched the car without a word. As we pulled out, the round clock face on the dash began to tick again, backwards, one minute at a time.

Dom has never told me what his father owed the coast, or what the coast owed him. He only says the hooded man on the old jacket was never meant for the fields, and that the scythe has a job, and the job always comes after midnight. I wrote the time on the ticket: 11:50. Then I wrote it again, and this time the pen didn't move.