Single-colour tattoo on a thigh of the words HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE, framed by swirling scrollwork in lettering and fine line style.

Quote lettering with scrollwork on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE in capital letters, stacked over five lines and set within a large outline of curling scrollwork. The linework is clean and even, with solid lettering and thin swirling lines of uniform dark ink. The ink is a single dark blue-black tone on pale skin, and the design fills most of the frame against a blurred green and blue background.

Lettering Fine line Thigh Quote Lettering Scrollwork Swirl Text Devil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Greaves Fair had more holes in its canvas than seats in its stands, and by September Mrs Abernethy had stopped mending them. She said rain would find its way in whichever way it liked, and the animals had grown used to being dripped on. Her son Tobias sold the last of the brass rings to a scrap man in Crewe and came back with the money down his boot, where he kept anything he did not want counted.

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The stranger came on the Tuesday, when the ground was too wet for the horses and the fire-eater was sulking in his wagon. He wore a grey coat buttoned to the throat and carried a ledger with no names in it, only sums written in curling ink that looped back on themselves like the lines around a painted sign. He asked for the owner. Mrs Abernethy had been dead two winters, so they took him to Tobias, who was counting tent pegs and not liking the number. "Your troupe owes a debt," the man said. "Everyone's does, eventually. I have come to collect the acts." Tobias laughed at him, then stopped, because the strongman had gone quiet and the dog that had never once stopped barking had lain down under the ticket table. "Where are the devils, then?" he asked. "If hell's empty, I'd like to know who's doing the work."

The man only turned the ledger round. Tobias saw his own name at the top, and under it, in the same loose hand, the name of every person who had ever bought a ticket and walked out before the final act. That night he paid the debt the only way he could think of. He carried the ledger to the fire-eater's barrel and let the pages catch. The grey coat man stood at the flap of the tent and watched the smoke climb through the hole in the roof, then walked out across the wet field toward the road. By morning the grass where he had stood had come up in a long curling line, as if someone had drawn it there with a pen.