Colour full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm showing Nightmare Before Christmas characters, jack-o'-lanterns and a haunted moonlit scene, in a neo-traditional style.

Nightmare Before Christmas full sleeve

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve shown from four angles, with Jack Skellington, Sally, a ghost dog, Oogie Boogie and a voodoo doll stacked down the arm against a haunted house, bare tree and spiral moon. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading for the night sky and smoke, and bright yellow, orange, green and purple accents on the pumpkins and characters. The composition runs from the upper arm to the wrist, with the panels arranged in a continuous scene.

Neo-trad Upper arm Forearm Jack skellington Sally Jack-o-lantern Pumpkin Bare tree Moon Spiral Bat Ghost Graveyard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first pumpkin split on the last Sunday of August, which is too early for pumpkins and too late for apples, so I knew something in the orchard had stopped keeping to the calendar. I went down the rows at six with a bucket and the torch I never need until October, counting the squat orange fruit by the old wall, and found one already wearing a face. Someone had cut the eyes in neat triangles and stitched the mouth with a row of tiny holes, the way you'd close a seam.

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I told myself it was Gary from the cider barn, who has a sense of humour and no bedtime. But the footprints didn't come up from the lane. They came down from the dead perry pear at the top of the slope, the one that hasn't leafed since my grandfather's day, and they were long and thin and spaced like a man walking on stilts. Bats flicked over the hedge while I stood there. The moon came up behind the cider shed, lopsided, with a curl of cloud wound round its edge, round and round like a spiral somebody had drawn with a compass.

That night I set a trap: a chipped bowl of cider on the step and a paper bag of humbugs beside it. I sat in the shed with the door ajar and waited. Something unfolded itself through the gate, all coat-hanger shoulders and striped legs, and it didn't touch the cider. It lifted the split pumpkin, balanced it on top of its head, and bowed to me as if we'd been introduced at a funeral.

By morning the bowl was dry and the humbugs were gone. In their place stood a small stitched doll against the gatepost, one button eye, a lollipop tucked under its arm, and a note pinned to its chest in careful capitals: KEEP THE SMALL ONES. WE COLLECT IN OCTOBER. I went back down the rows, chose the ugliest pumpkin I had, and set it on the wall where they could see it.