Black block lettering reading 'One foot in the grave...' on the back of a calf, with a prosthetic leg visible beside it.

Quote tattoo on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows a black tattoo of the phrase 'One foot in the grave...' set in two lines of bold, condensed capital and lowercase lettering on the back of a calf. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the skin tone is natural with no added colour. The left leg is a prosthetic with a dark socket and metal fittings, and the person wears dark shorts and white and black trainers on an indoor grey floor.

Lettering Calf Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ambrose Pilling had dug graves at St Oswald's for thirty-one years and had never once been asked to dig one for himself, which he thought a poor courtesy from the parish. His ledger in the potting shed listed every burial since 1993, with a small pencil mark beside each name for the weather on the day. Beside Walter Haigh's name, dated March, he had drawn a question mark, because Walter had been telling everyone in the Dog and Partridge that the grave Ambrose opened for him in February was the finest hole he had ever seen.

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"Not for me yet," Walter said, leaning on the bar with his cap pushed back. "Edith measured it. Six foot and a bit. She says I'll need the bit." The landlord laughed and Ambrose didn't, because the hole filled with rainwater every night and someone had to bail it before the vicar's Sunday visit. He had dug it straight and square, the way his father taught him, and it was the only thing in the churchyard that still looked new.

Walter came up the path the next Tuesday with a flask and a bag of pork pies, and sat on the spoil heap with his boots dangling as if it were a bench on the pier. He talked about the Wolves, the price of coal, a heron he had seen on the canal. Ambrose leaned on his spade and waited for the gloom to arrive, but Walter only ate his pie and said, "I want something carved on the stone that makes the lads laugh. Not the usual rot."

That evening Ambrose opened the ledger and turned to the question mark. Beneath it, in careful capitals, he wrote the words Walter had been asking for: One foot in the grave... Then, after a long look at the page, he added the ellipsis, because a man who joked that much deserved to be left hanging. He took the spade from its hook and went out to fill the hole in, not because it was wanted, but because he had decided Walter would not get the satisfaction of finding it open.