Black lettering tattoo reading "One foot in the grave" on the back of a calf, beside a blue prosthetic leg.

Lettering reading one foot in the grave on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a black text tattoo on the back of a bare calf, reading "One foot in the grave" over three lines in a bold serif typeface. The letters are solid black with no shading, and the skin tone is natural, with a blue prosthetic leg and a black sock on the other limb in the frame.

Lettering Calf Text Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Amos Dunn had dug graves in Caddick Row for thirty-one years and he never once kept a family waiting. He liked to mention it at the Miners' Welfare, tapping a beer mat on the bar. 'Keep one foot in the grave, lads,' he'd say, 'and you'll never be late for the work.' Most of the men thought it was a joke, and Amos let them think so.

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His granddaughter Nell thought the saying was morbid until the spring the colliery shut and half the street came knocking. Men who had gone down the shaft since they were fourteen wanted a spade and a reason to stand up in the morning. Amos gave them both. He showed them how to square a wall with a line and a nail, how to keep the spoil heap off the footpath, and how to rest the blade before it rested them. 'Ground doesn't care what you were,' he told them. 'It only cares that you come back.'

When his own time came, the men insisted on digging his plot themselves. They worked through the wet with their coats hung on the yew, and the youngest, a lad called Kit Harker, turned up a brass pit lamp in the clay, its glass cracked, its wick still dry. Nobody could say whose it was. Nell wanted to take it home, but the men agreed it belonged to the ground.

They set it on the lip of the grave before the box went down. The lamp caught the morning light and threw it along the path. Nobody lit it. Nobody needed to, not on a street where every man knew exactly which way he was walking.