Two side-by-side photos of black outline tattoos on a calf: a guillotine reading Keep your chin up, and a noose on a gallows reading Hang in there.

Guillotine and gallows with slogans on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a wooden guillotine with the words KEEP YOUR CHIN UP beneath it, and the right panel shows a noose hanging from a wooden gallows with HANG IN THERE beneath. Both designs use dark black linework with wood-grain detail and simple shading, with no colour ink. The two tattoos sit on the same leg, photographed against a grey brick wall.

Lettering Calf Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow came down over Harrowgate Pass so thick that the Thirsk coach stopped at the Drowned Ram and did not leave again until spring. Inside sat the hangman, Abel Corran, with his rope coiled in a leather bag on his knee, and the headsman, Josiah Vell, who had wrapped his blade in sacking because he never trusted an inn's kitchen knives. Neither had been sent for by the county, and neither spoke much.

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Innkeeper Mary Tallow set them both by the fire and gave them the same bowl of barley broth, which she said was the only honest thing on the premises. The two men began to talk about their work, the way men do when there is nothing else to look at. Vell said a clean drop was a kindness. Corran said a rope gave a man time to think, and a blade gave him none, and he could not decide which was the cruel one. They argued it through two jugs of ale until the candles guttered.

In the morning the wind had drifted the door shut. Tallow found a notice pinned to the taproom wall in a hand she did not know: Keep your chin up. Hang in there. Neither man would admit to writing it. They spent the day digging the path clear together, Corran hauling wood and Vell splitting it, and by dusk they had struck a bargain. Whichever of them the road sent for first, the other would walk him to the gate.

When the thaw came, the coach took both men down the pass on the same morning. Corran's rope stayed behind, hung over a beam to dry, and Tallow never took it down. The notice stayed on the wall, its corners curling, and travellers who read it at the bar sometimes laughed and sometimes did not.