Black and grey traditional flash design of a grim reaper lying on its front talking on a telephone, with a scythe and the words when death calls.

Grim reaper on a telephone with script

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hooded grim reaper with a skull face lies on its front, holding a corded telephone to its ear, with a scythe resting behind its skeletal legs. The words when death calls run in script along its body. Bold black outlines and solid black fills are softened with grey shading on a plain white background.

Traditional Grim reaper Skull Scythe Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now you'll want to sit down for this, because the telephone on Gannet Rock was never meant to ring after dark. My grandmother kept the lamp there for thirty-one years, and she swore the line went dead every night at ten, same as the oil wicks, until the winter the bell started up on its own.

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She lifted the earpiece and there was Death, bold as brass, lying flat on the lamp-room boards with his hood pushed back and his heels kicking at the air. He wanted the keeper's name, because the ledger said he'd be wanting a ferry out by Candlemas. My grandmother said she'd have to look, and he said he'd wait, and he did, with his scythe sticking out behind him like a dropped oar and the cord coiled across the floor like a sleeping eel.

She had a lie ready, a good plain one about the keeper being out at sea. Death laughed a dry laugh like a gate on rusty hinges and said the sea had never once stopped him. Then he asked, very politely, whether she'd ever been to a funeral where the sandwiches were any good. She said no. He said nor had he, and that was the first honest conversation either of them had had in years.

So she kept him talking until the lamp wanted trimming, and when she climbed back up the line was quiet. In the morning the ledger had one name struck through, though never the one she'd been dreading, and a ferryman called Pruett came out to Gannet Rock that spring looking very cross indeed. She never told me who she'd given Death in exchange. She only said the sandwiches were terrible.