Colour traditional tattoo of a claw hammer with a wooden handle wrapped in two banners reading TELL HIM I'M GONE, on the outer forearm.

Hammer with banner reading Tell him I'm gone

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A claw hammer with a wooden handle runs vertically down the forearm, with two blue-and-purple banners wrapped around the shaft carrying the words TELL HIM and I'M GONE. The linework is bold and dark, and the hammer head and handle use shaded orange-brown wood grain and grey metal. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a blurred background of a red shirt, jeans and a chair.

Traditional Forearm Hammer Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pell found the hammer propped against the stable gate on the Thursday morning, its claw head wrapped in a strip of blue ribbon and its ash handle already warm from the sun. Nobody in Coldharbour Yard had seen Tom Rawle since the Tuesday, when he walked out with his bag on one shoulder and his tools on the other, saying only that the hay barn roof would hold until spring.

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Ada carried the hammer into the kitchen and turned it over on the scrubbed table. Someone had cut letters into the handle with a penknife, small and careful, the way a joiner marks his own work so it cannot be taken for another man's. TELL HIM, said one side. I'M GONE, said the other. She read it twice, then a third time, and went to find Hector Rawle, who had been Tom's master for seven years and was not a man to be given riddles before breakfast.

Hector was mending a gate when she found him. He read the handle with his thumb along the cuts, went quiet, and then said that Tom had never once left a job half done, so he must have finished the roof first. They walked the lane together and climbed the ladder to the barn. Under the eaves, sitting dry on a shelf of new oak, was a tin of wages counted out to the penny, and beside it a single shaving of wood curled like a question mark.

Ada hung the hammer on its nail above the kitchen door, handle out, where anyone coming in from the yard would see it. Every morning after that she read the message before she lit the stove. She never answered it, but she said the words aloud to the empty kitchen, so that whoever had asked for them would know they had been delivered.