Back view of a person in a cap and black t-shirt, showing a black-ink rifle tattoo on the upper arm.

Rifle tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, wearing a dark cap, a black t-shirt with white block lettering and skinny washed jeans, with a navy bandana tucked into a back pocket. A small black-ink tattoo of a rifle sits on the outer upper arm, drawn as a simple silhouette with solid fill. The palette is black and grey with a warm sepia wash across the blurred street background.

Upper arm Gun Cap Bandana T-shirt Jeans Long hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put another log on the fire, Tomas, and mind the draught from the back door, because the snow has found its way under it again and the cold always makes a man tell the truth. You want to know about the rifle above the bar? Everyone asks. It hung there the winter the Aldgate road closed, and it belonged to nobody who would come back for it.

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Its owner was a surveyor called Hollis Crane, who arrived on the last coach with a leather case, a folded map of the moors and a cap pulled so low that Agnes could never read his face. He paid for a room a week ahead and never asked for the key. Each morning he walked past the stone wall to the ruined mill, sketching the ridge line, and each evening he came back with his boots white to the ankle and nothing in his notebook but columns of figures.

On the seventh night Agnes found the case unlatched on the landing. Inside there was no gun at all, only a sheet of thick paper folded around a rifle drawn in ink, the stock and barrel one solid black shape with no shading, as plain as a shadow cast on a wall. Beneath it, in small careful capitals, he had written the names of every man who had walked those hills before him, and beside each name a date and a single word: returned, or not.

He was gone by morning, and the case with him, though the paper stayed behind, pinned to the landing wall. Agnes took it down and hung it above the bar, where the stove keeps it warm and the smoke gives it the colour of old tea. Every winter since, I have wondered whether he was measuring the land or measuring how much of it a man could carry home, and whether he ever decided he had carried enough.