Hooded skeleton pushing a cart of skulls

Black and grey · Flash

A hooded skeleton figure with outstretched arms pushes a wooden cart filled with skulls, and a hammer and sickle is drawn on the side of the cart. Cyrillic lettering arcs across the top and runs in blocks beneath the image, including the years 1947 and 1963. The design uses dense hatched shading and bold outlines in black ink on a plain pale background.

Skeleton Skull Hood Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the mining village of Lesnaya Krutka, the old women said Death was a foreman, not a reaper. He came up the pit road each winter pushing his barrow, and he took the men who had not finished their shifts. Nobody had ever seen him stop to rest.

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Tomas Veryga had worked the coal face for nineteen years when the fever came through the lamp-house. He was not ready. Death found him in the wash-room, hands on the barrow handles, and said the cart was full but there was room for one more. Tomas asked what the skulls were for. Death said they were the hours owed to the company, and every man who died in debt went into the cart. The cart had to be emptied at the surface, by a man who had been counted.

Tomas proposed a wager. If he could push the barrow to the timber yard at the top of the shaft before the dawn whistle, he would go free. Death laughed, since the road was steep and the whistle never came late. Tomas pushed all night, past the winding wheel, the iron sickle stamped on the cart's side flaking under his palms. The skulls clacked and shifted but never fell.

At the timber yard the whistle sounded early. Death's hood slipped back, and Tomas saw that he had been counting the hours too. He had not won. He had been handed the barrow to empty. He tipped it onto the timber stacks, the skulls rolled out dry as chalk, and in the morning the children found a sickle burned into the wood with a row of names beneath it. They could not read the names, so they drew a hammer beside them on their slates.