Traditional style tattoo of a red and grey rooster hanging by its neck from a rope, on the calf of a leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rooster hanging from a rope on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cartoon rooster hangs from a twisted rope by its neck, with its wings out and its feet dangling. The bold black outlines and flat fills of red, grey and white give it a traditional look, with some shading on the wings and body. The design sits diagonally on the calf, with the rope running up and out of the frame against plain skin.

Traditional Calf Rooster Rope Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Hollins Road reunion mentioned the rooster until Gavin Pryce had his third pint and started on about the bell rope. Thirty-one years on and he still said it like there had only ever been the one, as if the whole school had taken turns hanging off it. We had rigged it in the autumn of Year Eleven. Gavin nicked a wooden cockerel from the Christmas fair stall on Mill Lane, the kind with a red comb you pulled to make it crow, and I held the stepladder while he knotted baler twine round its neck. He ran the other end up through the bell tower hatch and tied it to the rope, so when Mr Ashby rang the bell for assembly the thing shot up and flapped about under the rafters like it had got into trouble. Half the school saw it. The head never found out who did it, though Mr Ashby suspected us for years.

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Carol Hebden, who is a magistrate now and has never once let anything slide, said the statute of limitations had run out on us sometime in 1996. Gavin laughed so hard he spilled his drink, then admitted he had kept the rooster in a shoebox under his bed for three decades. He had it in the boot of his car. We all trooped out to the car park to look at it under the pub's security light, a small dusty bird with its wings flung out and its feet tucked up, and for a moment nobody said anything at all. Then Carol asked whether it was the same twine, and that set us off again.

On the Saturday after, Gavin, Carol and I borrowed a ladder from the church hall and climbed the tower at the old school, which has been empty since the council sold it. The rope was still there, gone grey and stiff. Gavin wouldn't let anyone else tie the knot. He took his time over it, tongue between his teeth, the way he used to do his maths homework, and when he was finished he stood back and looked at it with real pride. It was a good knot. Better than ours had ever been.