Traditional style colour tattoo of a grim reaper holding a scythe in front of an orange sun, on the calf.

Grim reaper with scythe on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A skeletal grim reaper in a black hooded cloak leans on a long scythe, with red-rimmed eyes and a grinning skull. A large orange sun sits behind the figure, and wispy pink and grey smoke trails from the cloak along the lower edge. Bold black outlines frame the solid fills of red, green, orange and black, set against the curve of the leg.

Traditional Calf Grim reaper Skull Skeleton Scythe Sun Hood Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody tells you the reaper is a bloke who has to clock in. Mine is called Ray, though he never answers to it, and he comes up the back stairs of Ward Seven at ten to two with his scythe over one shoulder, like a gardener's rake that has seen better decades. I'm the night porter. I push the linen trolley and I know which bays go quiet a good while before the buzzers do.

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Last March he found me at the vending machine, feeding it coins. He wanted a packet of ready salted and a tea he never once drank. 'Not tonight, Dennis,' he said, though I had never told him my name. 'I'm just watching the sun come up over the car park. It's the only bit of the job I like.' Behind him the window was still black, but there was a smear of orange low over the multistorey, the way there is when the first lorries pull in.

We talked about the smoke, which is what he calls the grey and pink wisps that trail off his cloak. It's only the breath of the wards, he said, the things nobody can hold on to. I asked whether he ever got sick of it. He laughed, a dry sound like a page turning, and said the trick was knowing when your shift ended. Then he tipped the scythe towards the lift, and the doors opened without anybody pressing anything.

At half six the day staff came in stamping rain off their boots and the place smelt of toast. I mopped the corridor outside Bay Four slowly, the way you'd mop round someone's sleeping feet. Ray's tea sat on the windowsill, still full, and the sun came up orange over the car park as though it had been waiting for him to finish.