Black and grey tattoo of a bare tree, full moon, iron graveyard fence and carved jack-o'-lantern pumpkins on a patch of skin.

Halloween graveyard scene with jack-o'-lanterns

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a graveyard scene with a leafless tree leaning over a wrought iron fence, a pale full moon behind it, and gravestones among rocks. Two carved jack-o'-lantern pumpkins sit in the foreground, one with a grinning face, rendered with soft grey shading and fine linework. The design is in black and grey ink on lightly toned skin, with the tree branches and pumpkin edges given the most contrast.

Other Tree Moon Graveyard Pumpkin Jack-o-lantern Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lanterns had to be lit before the church clock struck nine, or Eddie Pratt swore the dead would have the fence down out of spite. Nell carried the box of matches up the path between the stones while the wind worked at the old elm, its bare limbs scraping the moon as if it wanted to wipe it clean. Forty years of Hallowe'en in Thorncombe and her father had never once missed the carving, not even the year his hands shook too much to hold the knife.

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The first pumpkin she set on the flat grave of Reuben Coyle, who had owed the parish a bell rope for eleven years. She struck a match and the grinning one caught, its teeth flickering across the rocks and the tilted headstones. The second she placed on the wall by the gate, where her father always put the one with the crooked eyebrows. He had carved them both in October, sitting at the kitchen table with a lamp pulled close, humming a tune she never learned the name of.

A bicycle clicked to a stop outside the railings. The boy who had moved into the new houses on Mill Lane stood with his hands in his coat, staring at the lanterns as if they might bite. Why are you doing this, he asked. Nell considered the question. So the moon knows someone is still minding the place, she said, and so the people who went before can find the way home. He nodded slowly, the way children nod at things adults say to end a conversation, but he came through the gate anyway.

She gave him the spare box of matches. Together they lit the third lantern, the small one nobody carved, and set it on the step of the empty vault where no name had been cut yet. Behind them the elm went still for the first time all evening, and the grinning face threw its light up the trunk until the moon above seemed to lean down and look too.