Two black ink tattoos on a lower leg, a guillotine labelled Keep your chin up and a gallows with a noose labelled Hang in there, set against a brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Guillotine and gallows calf tattoos

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on a lower leg, each showing a wooden structure with bold outlines and wood-grain detail: a guillotine on the left and a gallows with a noose on the right. Each design has a short slogan in capital lettering beneath it, with Keep your chin up on the left and Hang in there on the right. The work is entirely black and grey, photographed against a brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ezra Quill had built the gallows for Saltcombe for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked him to make them cheerful. So when the new magistrate, a man who collected sayings the way other men collected stamps, sent word that the yard wanted lettering beneath the drop, Ezra put down his plane and walked up the hill to argue.

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"Keep your chin up," the magistrate said, tapping a pencil sketch on his desk. "For the condemned, you understand. Something decent to take with them." Ezra studied the drawing, the cross-grain on the uprights, the blade hung just so, and thought about the rain coming in off the harbour. "A blade doesn't need encouragement," he said. "It needs oiling." But he took the commission, because the wood was good oak from the Pardoe estate and his daughter needed boots.

He carved the frame slowly, and when it was finished he sent for Dora Lusk, who painted the names on the fishing smacks and had the steadiest hand in the town. She came down to the yard with her brushes wrapped in oilcloth and looked at the two structures standing side by side against the brick wall of the old tithe barn. "You've made a pair," she said. "Who's the second one for?" Ezra didn't know. He only knew the magistrate had asked for a gallows as well, and that the man had a weakness for pairs.

The condemned never saw the lettering. The gallows were rarely used and the guillotine never at all, though the magistrate kept it greased. What the town saw was the boys who cut through the yard on their way to school, reading aloud in the way boys do. Last spring Ezra watched one of them stop at the wall, sound out the words twice, and then shout them across the harbour to a grey-bearded fisherman mending a net on the quay. The man laughed until he had to sit down, and then he looked up at the rain and said, quite seriously, that he supposed he would.