Black and white flash design of open lips with a dagger piercing through them, dripping drops, and the words NOT JUST TALK arched above.

Mouth and dagger flash with NOT JUST TALK lettering

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pair of open lips shows teeth and a tongue, with a dagger with a dotted grip piercing the design from the upper right. Bold black outlines frame the lips, blade and droplets, and dotwork stippling shades the tongue and dagger handle. The words NOT JUST TALK are arched across the top on a plain white background.

Traditional Dotwork Lip Mouth Tongue Dagger Knife Blood drop Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Everyone in Ashcombe knew my aunt Maud could talk the bark off a birch. She sat at the post-office hatch from seven until the church bell, and whatever came through her mouth was down the lane to the mill and the Hallams' farm by dinner. When she told Mr Pryce his hens were wandering because his gate was rotten, she was right, but she said it loud enough for the whole queue to hear, and the queue went home and told it again with an extra limp in it.

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I took Grandad's kindling knife to the edge of Ferrow Wood one wet October, its handle wrapped in black cord worn smooth. I was not going to hurt her. I only meant to leave it in the stile where she walked her dog every evening, so she would know I had been listening.

The wood was quiet in the way it gets before rain. Beyond the last oak I could hear the mill wheel and, closer, a dog barking at nothing. I stood with the knife in my hand and found I had no speech ready at all. Maybe that was the point. Talk costs nothing, and I had spent forty years paying for other people's.

I pushed the blade into the stile post, point down, and walked home without looking back. Maud never mentioned it. Three days later she came to the hatch with her mouth shut tight, and the village spent a week guessing what had happened to her tongue. I still have the knife. It hangs by my back door, and every time I take it down I think about how little needed saying.