Black and grey traditional grim reaper skull with star-shaped eyes and dotwork shading, above the words SING ME TO SLEEP, on a lower leg.

Grim reaper with lettering on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A hooded grim reaper skull with star-shaped eyes and a toothy grin sits above the bold capitals SING ME TO SLEEP. The bold black outlines are filled with stippled dotwork shading in the hood and across the skull, with solid black areas for contrast. Dark tattooed shapes sit at the edges of the frame, and the design is centred on the skin in black and grey only.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

14th March. Forty-one days out of Valparaiso and the Marigold has not made a knot since Tuesday. The men have started calling the thing on the foredeck Mister Hood, though none will admit to seeing it. Cook swears it asks for water in a voice like wet gravel. I have seen only the stars where its eyes should be, pale and quite steady, watching the rigging as if counting the lines.

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Last night it came to the forecastle hatch and sat down beside the boy Eli, who has the fever. It did not touch him. It only looked at him for a long while, and then it sighed, the way a man sighs when his boots pinch. It said, quite politely, that it had walked a great distance and would be grateful for something to hear on the way back. Nobody had a fiddle. I had a hymnbook and a voice nobody has ever paid to hear.

So I sang. Rock of Ages, then the one about the drowned lighthouse keeper my mother used to hum, then whatever came into my head. By the third verse the creature had drawn its hood forward and its grin had softened into something like a child's. Eli slept. The fever broke before the bell. When I climbed up at dawn, the hood lay empty on a coil of rope and the stars had gone out.

Mister Hood has not come back, and the wind has returned. Eli asks each morning whether the gentleman will visit again. I told him Mister Hood is resting up in the crosstrees, and that it is the duty of whoever stands the last watch to keep him sleeping. Cook says I have lost my wits. Perhaps. Tonight I shall go up with the hymnbook anyway, in case he is awake and wants the second verse.

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