Black ink tattoo of a horned, snake-tailed creature above the words Never run from anything immortal, on the upper arm of a woman in a navy vest top.

Horned creature and slogan on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A creature with horns, a mane-like crest and a snake-like tail is shown mid-stride on the upper arm, with the words NEVER RUN above and FROM ANYTHING IMMORTAL below. The linework is clean and outlined with fine shading inside the body, and the lettering is in a simple spaced capital typeface. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits against plain pale skin and a white background.

Upper arm Creature Slogan Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign outside Mrs Abernethy's chandlery had hung there longer than the lifeboat house, and by the summer you turned nine you could read it upside down from the end of the pier: NEVER RUN FROM ANYTHING IMMORTAL. Beneath the words, the painter had put a beast with a ram's skull for a head, a mane like wet kelp and a tail that coiled back on itself like a green rope, lifting one hoof off the board as if it meant to step down into the street. Gulls ignored it. Children did not.

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The fog came in off the mole on the evening your brother dared you to the lighthouse steps. You heard it before you saw it, a click of hooves on wet stone, unhurried, and then a grey shape with lantern-coloured eyes was keeping pace with you on the far side of the slipway. Your legs wanted to go. Your brother was already gone, shouting. Mrs Abernethy's voice came through the murk from her doorstep, flat and certain. Walk, love. Walk like you've paid for the road.

So you walked. The beast walked too, its tail flicking the rail posts one by one, and you counted them the way you counted sheep in your nan's top field, until the pier ended and the thing stopped at the bollard where the Mairi had gone down forty years before. It lowered its horned head to the iron, breathed on it, and lay down in the shallows as if it had been waiting for someone to tell it the tide had turned.

You still walk everywhere in that town, slow and upright, and the old folk nod at you as though you have passed a test. You never learned what the creature was owed. Only that a thing which will not die is easier to walk beside than to outrun.