Black and grey dotwork tattoo on a forearm showing a tarot-style card labelled LA MORT with a skull, a hand holding the card edge, and a mandala below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

La Mort tarot skull and hand on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tarot-style card labelled LA MORT sits above a hand that pinches its lower edge, with a skull printed on the card. Below the hand is a circular mandala-like ornament with radiating petals. The work uses fine stippled dots and light linework in black ink and grey shading, shown on a raised forearm against a denim and grey clothing background.

Dotwork Forearm Skull Hand Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Creed cut his woodblocks in the tower room of the ruined keep at Harrowgate, because the light was good there in the mornings and nobody climbed the stairs. He carved a fool, a queen, a tower splitting in two, and last of all a skull with a hand raised beside it, two fingers pinching the lower edge of the card as if it were a letter that might be taken back.

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When the cards were printed, the sheriff's clerk bought the full pack for his master's Christmas table, and the air in the keep began to change. Each night Tobias climbed the spiral stair and found the blocks moved, the skull turned to face the door. He locked the tower. In the morning the lock hung open and the card marked LA MORT lay on the sill, pinched neatly at its lower edge, face out.

He took it down to the village priest, who said Death was not a thing a man could bargain with, only a thing that visited when it was ready. Tobias went back up with a pot of ink and a brush. He printed one more card, a copy of the skull, and under it he wrote his own name in the careful capitals he used for saints.

On the feast of St Brice the sheriff's clerk died in his chair, his pack of cards face down beside him. Tobias was found in the keep the following spring, sitting at the top of the stair with his blocks in his lap. The card by his hand had his name beneath the skull, and its edge had been pinched, as though someone had lifted it to look closer and then decided, with some courtesy, to leave it where it lay.