Black dotwork tattoo of a smoking pipe below a city skyline with a crescent moon and the word Gotham, on the stomach above red trousers.

Pipe and city skyline on the abdomen

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo of a pipe with smoke rising into a city skyline, with a crescent moon, small diamond shapes and the word GOTHAM in block lettering. The smoke and water areas are built from fine stippled dots, while the buildings and pipe use solid black outlines and shading. Below it, a larger cursive script is partly cut off by the frame, and the skin is shown with red leather trousers and rings on the hands at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Lettering Other Pipe Skyline City Moon Smoke Diamond Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Creed kept the barge Marrow on the slow brown water between Ashcombe lock and the city, and he never let his pipe go out at the tiller. His daughter Nell said it was the only thing he loved more than the river, and that was saying something, since the river had taken her mother in a hard winter.

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The city they carried coal towards was called Gotham by the bargemen, because someone had painted the name on a warehouse wall years back and nobody had scrubbed it off. From the water at dusk its towers stood up like a row of broken teeth, with a thin crescent moon hanging over them like a hook. Tobias swore that the smoke from his pipe rose off the water and sorted itself into those towers each evening, so that he could find his way home by it.

One November the fog came down thick as wool and the lamps on the wharf went out. Nell stood at the bow with a boathook, counting the mooring stakes, while her father sat smoking with his eyes shut. "Keep the smoke going," she called back. "I can't see the towers." He said the city would be there whether they saw it or not, and he was right, but the smoke did not come. Instead the fog thinned in a long grey streak, and the lit window of the lock keeper's cottage showed exactly where the towers should have been.

They tied up at first light. Tobias knocked the ash out against the rail and said nothing. Nell understood then that the smoke had only ever been his way of pointing her home, and that she would have to learn to follow something else. She kept the pipe on the shelf after that and steered by the moon.