Black and grey flash design of Jack Skellington and Sally in a sugar skull style, with roses, pumpkins and blackletter lettering, with no body placement shown.

Jack and Sally blackletter design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey illustration of the cartoon characters Jack Skellington and Sally, drawn with sugar skull detailing, set in a coffin shape. Surrounding them are roses, jack o' lantern pumpkins, bats and a ghost dog, with the blackletter lettering reading Simply Meant To Be across the lower half. The work uses dense hatching and fine linework, with one grey heart as the only tonal accent.

Lettering Jack skellington Sally Sugar skull Rose Heart Coffin Bat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming off the canopy for an hour when the couple from the coffin-shaped stall at the end of Castle Row finally stopped arguing about the price of a pumpkin. I'd sold them nothing but a bag of pins. Mrs Okonedo, who ran the fishmongers beside me, said they came every Thursday in October and never bought anything bigger than a candle.

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Then the grey dog came through the gap between the stalls, low and dripping, its stitched seams shining under the bulbs. Nobody else seemed to notice it. It sat down on my doormat of old newspaper and looked at the roses in my bucket as if it had ordered them.

The roses were the only thing I'd grown myself. Twelve stems, red at the edge and black at the heart, and I'd spent a year trying to make them the colour of a fresh bruise without anyone asking why. The tall, thin man came back alone that night. He held a single grey heart in his palm, carved from something that looked like soap and smelled of cloves, and asked whether I could letter a message on it in the old black script, the kind you see on tombstones and tavern signs.

I told him the lettering would take a week. He said they had a week. He said it simply had to be right. I wrote the words on a card in my best blackletter, three lines that ran into one another like rain on a windscreen, and when I looked up the dog had gone and the roses had gone limp in the bucket. The man was already walking away under his umbrella, humming a tune that had no business being so cheerful in the wet.