Black and grey guillotine tattoo reading Keep your chin up beside a gallows with noose reading Hang in there, both on a lower leg.

Guillotine and gallows tattoos on lower legs

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two black and grey tattoos sit side by side on a person's lower legs against a grey brick wall. The left design shows a guillotine with the words KEEP YOUR CHIN UP beneath it, and the right shows a wooden gallows with a noose above the words HANG IN THERE. The linework is bold and outlined, with simple hatched shading on the timber and a clean, centred composition.

Lettering Calf Wood Rope Lettering Slogan

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Duke's new guillotine came up the Ferrow road on a Tuesday, in a cart that had lost a wheel and most of its temper, and Master Hask blamed me for all three. I had signed for it. Nobody else in Ferrowgate could write a clean hand, which is how a hangman's girl ends up with a pen and a pile of debts.

Keep reading

The blade was bright as a fishwife's knife, but it would not drop. The grooves had swollen in the rain. I spent that evening with a plane and a pot of tallow, shaving the runners, while Hask sat on the gallows steps and told me the trade was all courtesy. "A man on the board needs telling to keep his chin up," he said. "It is the last kindness we have to give." He had a board painted for the yard the next morning. I thought it a grim joke until I saw him stand before it with his cap held over his heart.

Business was slow that winter. Only two men went up the steps all season, a horse thief and a boy who had stolen bread for his sisters. The boy was the one that undid Hask. He wept at the foot of the gallows, and the old man crouched in the mud beside him, fixing the knot with hands that shook, and said, "Hang in there, lad, it will all be over before the bell," in a voice I had never heard him use.

The bell did ring. A clerk who had been drinking since noon pardoned the boy at the last minute, and he went home to his sisters with a loaf under each arm. Hask never painted another board. He scraped the lettering from the gallows post with a rag and turned the beam to face the wall, so the yard looked like any other for years afterwards. I still cannot say whether that was mercy or cowardice, or which of the two of us he was protecting.