Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a hooded grim reaper holding a glass object with wisps of smoke, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grim reaper with smoke on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A hooded grim reaper with a skull face stands in a dark cloak, holding a small glass object with wisps of smoke rising from it. The linework is bold and the shading uses dense stippling in the robes and cloak, with lighter greys on the skull and hands. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with the image framed vertically and centred on the design.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Grim reaper Skeleton Skull Hood Cloak Smoke Glass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the fire, you lot, and don't reach for your cups yet, because this is the part where the cold comes through the shutters. Old Tobias Crane kept the Stag at Hollin Pass, and the winter the road closed behind the carriers, he had three guests and a barrel of perry that should have lasted to Candlemas. Then the knock came, three slow raps, the kind you feel in your back teeth.

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Death stood in the doorway with snow piled on his hood like a cowl of salt. He had come for the carter's boy, who was asleep upstairs with a fever, and he said so plainly, because he was never one for tact. Tobias did not argue. He poured two fingers of the good spirit into a glass, set it on the bar between them, and said, "You've walked a long way. Warm yourself first, then do your business."

The reaper considered this a long while. Smoke rose off the glass in grey threads, though there was no candle near it. He lifted the glass, and this is the strangest bit: he drank nothing. He only held it, turning it slowly, watching the smoke curl past the bones of his fingers the way a man watches a stranger's fire from the road. "Nobody has offered me a seat in three hundred years," he said. "The ones who do are usually lying to keep their souls."

Tobias pulled up a stool and told him he had no soul to spare and never had, and so they sat until the fire was ash. In the morning the thaw had come and the carter's boy was sitting up, demanding porridge. The glass stood empty on the bar, still faintly warm, and nobody ever saw the hooded man leave. Mind, the smoke was still rising from it when Tobias locked up, and in all my years it has never once stopped.