Collage of six traditional style tattoos on skin, including a rocket, a mouse head with a bow, a skull, a shotgun shell, a spider and a key with a heart, several marked with the number 13.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six traditional flash tattoos with the number 13

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows six close-up photographs of traditional style tattoos: a rocket, a mouse head with a red bow, a skull, a shotgun shell, a black widow style spider and a key with a heart. Most designs carry the number 13, and the spider has a red hourglass marking on its abdomen. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, yellow, pink and grey give the set a classic, graphic look.

Traditional Rocket Mouse Bow Skull Spider Key Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, lad, for my father never told this one standing. Hollin Pit had thirteen men on the early shift the spring the new winding chain came, and Walter Bosworth, the overman, counted them twice at the cage gate because he was a superstitious sort and a careful one. Twelve, then a thirteenth came pelting across the pit yard with his snap tin under his arm, having slept through the whistle. Bosworth should have sent him home. Instead he only muttered thirteen, and the lad rode down with his elbows in the others' ribs.

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Bosworth wore a brass key on a string round his neck, the lamp-room key with a heart cut into its bow, and he swore it had let him out of worse places than that. Above the lamp-room door hung a black spider in the timbers with a red mark on its belly like an hourglass, and the men called her the widow. Nobody swept her down. You don't sweep a widow. That morning she dropped onto the lamp-room bench, ran under the paraffin tins, and sat still while the lad with the snap tin laughed at her.

The shot-firer that week had a box of cartridges with red-banded shells, and a fuse went fizzing out of the old powder store every time someone struck a match too near. None of it touched the thirteen. What touched them was the cage, which stopped halfway at the fourth landing with a jolt and hung there in the dark for an hour while the men sang hymns and the lad went quiet.

When the chain was mended and they came up into daylight, Bosworth counted them out again, thirteen, every one. He took the key from his neck and hung it on the lad's, and said that was the widow's fee paid and no more owed. My father said the lad carried that key till the day he died, and never once stepped into a lift without counting the men inside it.