Pencil and marker drawing of a stitched scarecrow figure wearing a wide-brimmed witch hat, two gas masks and a rope noose, shown in black and grey shading.

Scarecrow in a witch hat and gas masks

Black and grey · Flash

A grey-shaded illustration of a stitched, scarecrow-like figure in a wide-brimmed witch hat, with a gas mask fitted over each side of its face. A rope loops around the neck and hangs down the front of the tattered, ragged clothing. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading and white highlights on the fabric, set against a plain cream paper background.

Stitches Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm hands you the sacking before the bell for Lauds, and you understand the job is yours now that his knees have given up on the furrows. The field behind the infirmary has been lost to crows three springs running. He tells you the scarecrow must have a face the birds will respect, so he has been saving the old respirators from the cellar, two rubber-rimmed eyes that once belonged to a war nobody in the abbey talks about.

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You work through the morning with a sack of straw, a length of tarred rope and a needle that keeps catching your thumb. The face takes longest. You stitch a grin across the burlap with white thread because Anselm says a mouth that cannot speak keeps the crows guessing. The hat is a felt thing from the lost-property basket, wide enough to shade a dog, and you pin it at a rakish tilt because the boy who left it had no further use for it.

By Compline the thing stands at the field's edge, its rope collar hanging loose down its front, shivering in the wind off the hill. You wait for the crows to come in at dusk and watch them settle on the fence instead of the seed. Anselm claps your shoulder and says the rope is only for lashing the figure to the post, nothing more, and you believe him until you walk past the field at dawn and find it turned to face the chapel, its masked eyes fixed on your window.