Black line tattoo on the calf of a skeleton beside a RIP headstone, with a speech bubble reading CAN I PET YOUR DOG PLEASSSE.

Skeleton asking to pet a dog on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A skeleton sits on a grave beside a RIP headstone, one arm raised towards a speech bubble that reads CAN I PET YOUR DOG PLEASSSE. The design uses thin, slightly wobbly single-line linework in dark ink with no shading, set on a plain skin background. The tattoo sits centrally on the lower leg, with the skeleton and bubble arranged vertically in the frame.

Fine line Calf Skeleton Speech bubble Dog Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the rain has got into the lych gate again. Mr Pratt the verger says the yews need cutting back, but I have been watching the small grave by the wall, the one with the crooked headstone that reads R.I.P. in letters someone pressed in with a nail. The bones there have been sitting up since Easter, arm out, waiting on the same thing every evening at half five.

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Half five is when Mrs Dunmore walks her spaniel, Bramble, along the path between the graves, because the route is shorter than the road and she says the dead never complain about dogs. Bramble always stops at the wall. Last night the skeleton said it again, in the sort of voice you get from a man with no lungs and a great deal of manners. Can I pet your dog, please. He has asked for three weeks. I told him dogs are not mine to give out, and he said that was the trouble with the living, they thought everything was theirs.

This afternoon I finally asked Mrs Dunmore. She looked at me for a long time, then at the grave, then at the sky, which is how people in this village decide things. She said Bramble had been sniffing that corner since she was a puppy and had never once gone near it. So I stood aside and watched. Bramble trotted over, sat down in the wet grass beside the bones, and laid her chin on a knee that was not quite there anymore.

The skeleton did not say please that time. He just went very still, the way bones do when they are not used to being touched, and then he lifted one hand and rested it on her head, slowly, as if she were something he was afraid to break. Mrs Dunmore said she had never seen the dog so happy. I wrote it down, though nobody will believe me. Tomorrow I am cutting the yews.