Traditional style tattoo of a grim reaper holding a scythe and smoking a cigarette, with 'Life's a Drag' script, on the upper leg.

Grim reaper with scythe and script

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A grim reaper in a dark hooded robe holds a scythe and a lit cigarette, with curling smoke above, and wears fishnet stockings and heeled shoes. Bold black outlines and solid shading define the figure, with red and pink accents on the robe lining and stockings, and yellow curls showing from the hood. The phrase 'Life's a Drag' is written in black script above and below the figure, which fills the centre of the frame on a smooth limb.

Traditional Thigh Grim reaper Scythe Cigarette Smoke Skull Script High heel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Reaper came aboard the Patience at Brentford lock on a Tuesday, which I'd always been told was the wrong day for it. He stood on my back deck in a black hooded robe and a pair of fishnets that had seen better decades, his scythe propped against the coal bunker, and asked me for a light. I gave him a box of Swan Vestas, because by then I had no manners left and he had none to speak of.

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He was nothing like the chapel pictures. He talked about the lock keeper's gout and the price of Lyons cakes, and every so often he tapped his cigarette and a curl of smoke drifted up and hung over the water like someone reconsidering. "Life's a drag," he said, "you'll have noticed." I said I'd noticed the drag and not much of the life, and he laughed so hard his heels slid on the wet planks.

We went through three locks together. At each one he asked the keeper for a bit of slack, and the keepers, who had all worked this stretch longer than their wives had put up with them, gave it to him without a word. By Teddington I was ready to hand over the tiller and whatever else he fancied. He took the matches instead and said I'd want them more than he would, where he was going next.

When I tied up at Brentford that evening, the matchbox was lying on the coal bunker, empty and still warm. The lock keeper's dog was sitting on the towpath, staring at the water, and somewhere downstream a bell rang for a boat that had not yet been asked to stop.