Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a horned demon with ram horns, wings and clawed hands on an upper arm.

Horned demon with wings on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A horned demonic face sits at the centre, flanked by ram horns and spread wings, with two clawed hands gripping its jaw area and a long, drooping torso and tendril-like forms below. The design uses bold outlines with stippled dotwork shading across the wings and body, giving a grey tonal range. The composition is symmetrical and fills the upper arm, with another dark tattooed wing and a chain visible at the right edge.

Traditional Dotwork Upper arm Demon Horn Wing Hand Creature Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the draught, the back door hasn't latched since the big tide in thirty-one. Now you'll want the lamp turned up for this part. Old Mrs Coyle, who kept the rooms at Gull Rest before the war, swore the lamp was what kept him off the back stairs. He came up out of the rock pools below Scarrow Head one August, when the tide went out further than anyone had ever seen it go. Horns like a tup's, curled tight as a clock spring. Wings folded wet against his shoulders, the feathers still full of weed.

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The fishermen gave him a wide berth, but he never came for them. He walked the sea wall at dusk with his two long hands raised to his face, gripping his own jaw as if it might come loose and tell the parish what he'd done. Mrs Coyle said he'd made a bargain with the sea once and kept only the half that suited him. Every night he stood at the low-water line holding his mouth shut, so the tide would come in quiet and nobody would hear the drowned men calling from under the shingle.

A schoolmaster from Leeds, lodging with her that winter for his chest, asked why she didn't just bolt the door against the thing. She said you don't bolt out a creature that's keeping its own mouth shut for you. Then she fetched him a candle and walked him up the stairs herself.

So when the wind swings round to the north, you'll hear the knocking on the back door, and you'll hear it stop when you speak to it. Don't ask me how I know. Go on, bed. Mind the third stair. It's the one he sits on.