Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of Jack Skellington and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, sitting on the back of a calf.

Jack and Sally on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows Sally, with stitched limbs and a polka dot dress, leaning in front of Jack Skellington, whose skull head and striped collar are rendered in grey. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the faces, the stitching and the bodies. The composition is tall and fills the length of the calf, with the figures set against bare skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pennick had been working the same seam for three nights, the one that ran down the back of the tallest doll in the window of Crouch's Toy Mart, because the thread kept pulling loose wherever the stuffing was thinnest. Her fingers had gone stiff. The shop bell had rung twice since midnight, and both times the street outside had been empty except for the frost crawling up the lamp posts.

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The third time, the skeleton came in. He wore a striped coat buttoned to the throat and a grin stitched on with black cotton, and he removed his hat with the care of a man who had been polite for a very long time. He asked whether she could mend a heart. Ada said hearts were beyond her trade. He said he had been told she could mend anything, and from inside his coat he lifted a rag-girl in a polka-dot skirt, one arm hanging by a single thread, her mismatched eyes wide and fixed on Ada as if they had been waiting all winter for a decent face to look at.

Ada worked until the candles guttered. With each stitch she set, the girl leaned a little closer to the skeleton, until by grey dawn they stood shoulder to shoulder like two people waiting on the same platform. Ada bit off the last knot and asked his price. "A hand's breadth of the first snow," he said, "kept on your sill until it melts."

When Ada opened the shutters at seven, the sill was white. Beside it lay a paper heart, stitched shut along its edges in black thread, with a single line inside in careful pencil: Thank you, the seam will hold.

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