Black ink flash design of a grinning face with a stitched mouth, a small jack o lantern and a spiral in its eyes, above a striped winged shape, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grinning stitched face and winged design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a black ink design drawing with two parts: a face with a wide, stitched grin and eyes containing a small jack o lantern and a spiral, and a symmetrical winged shape with vertical stripes below it. The linework is bold and solid, with areas of heavy black fill, dark silhouettes and fine hatched detail on the wings. The design is on a plain white background with no colour and no body part visible.

Blackwork Face Grin Stitches Spiral Wing Halloween

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wind, it comes off the col like it owes somebody money. Aye, that's the pass. Nobody crosses it after the lamps are lit in Hallow Dyke, not since the Mallory boy went over with his cart and came back with his own mouth set on the wrong side of his face.

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Here is what the carters say. The thing that lives under the scree has a grin stitched on with black thread, one stitch for every man who ever lied to it. Its left eye holds a little lantern, carved like a turnip, and it flickers when the thing is pleased. Its right eye is a spiral that turns and turns, so if you look too long you find yourself counting the rounds and forgetting your own name. Its wings are not wings at all but the long striped shadows of the rocks, and when the moon is down they spread across the road and wait.

Old Ansel Frood was the only man who ever went up with a bag of salt and a bag of questions. He did not bring a lantern. He sat on the cairn at midnight and told the grin that it had nothing he wanted, which was a lie, and the grin knew it, and the stitches began to pull. He was not a brave man. He was only tired of owing.

So what did it take from him? Nothing at all, which is the worst of it. In the morning they found his cart at the top of the pass, his boots set neatly side by side, and his mouth stitched shut with black thread, grinning as if he had just heard a very good joke. Mind the wind on your way home, and do not tell it any lies.