Black and grey realism tattoo of a mask with ornate script lettering above and a revolver below, on a limb.

Mask, script lettering and revolver tattoo

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo shows a shaded mask with deep eye recesses and a fine smile, with smoke or ribbon-like shapes curling around it. Ornate gothic-style script sits across the top, and the bottom edge shows a revolver partly visible. The shading uses smooth grey gradients and strong contrast, and the piece fills most of the frame against a pale background.

Realism Lettering Other Mask Script Lettering Revolver Gun Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's daughter was already married when the man in the mask came up the lane, and nobody at the wedding had invited him. He wore a grey face with a thin painted smile and deep hollows where the eyes should be, and a revolver sat in his belt like an old habit he had not bothered to break. The fiddlers stopped mid-reel. Old Harrow, who had owed the mill a hundred pounds since the flood, stood so fast his chair went over backwards.

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The masked man did not speak to Harrow. He walked past the trestle tables to the bonfire behind the barn, where the village burned its grievances every harvest as the old custom asked, and he drew from his coat a bundle of letters tied with brown tape. Each envelope had a name written across it in pencil. He fed them to the fire one at a time, and the smoke rose in pale ribbons that wound through the apple trees and over the slates of the barn roof.

"What is owed is owed," Harrow said, though his voice had lost its bluster. The man only shook his head and kept feeding the fire. When the last envelope had gone, he lifted the bride's veil from the tray where her mother had left it, shook the ash from its hem, and laid it gently across her shoulders. Then he turned and walked back down the lane the way he had come, and the revolver never once left his belt.

In the morning the miller found his ledger open on the kitchen table, every page torn out and every debt gone to grey flakes in the stove. The bride's veil hung on the back of a chair, its edge scorched brown. Nobody in the village could say whose debts had been paid, only that the smoke had smelled of a fire that someone had chosen to light.