Black and grey flash design of a pin-up skeleton woman and a top-hatted skeleton man holding hands, with a banner quote above and below them.

Skeleton couple with banner quote

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing shows a skeletal woman with a high ponytail and a skeletal man in a top hat and suit jacket, reaching toward each other. Two ribbon banners frame them, carrying the lettering 'When no one else will be your friend, I'll do the job'. The linework uses bold outlines and dense hatching for shading, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Traditional Skeleton Pin-up Top hat Banner Couple Lettering Ribbon Suit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Mind the lantern, Pell, the ground's soft where the castle wall gave way last winter." Mr Ashdown said it without looking round, as though I were the one who had kept him waiting. We were cutting a new grave on the bank below Hawksmoor Keep, where the ivy had got into the chapel and nobody had the nerve to take it back.

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The woman we were burying was Edie Marlow, who sang at the Crown on Saturdays and had no kin left in the parish. The town had given her a pauper's box and a shrug. Ashdown gave her his top hat, his good gloves and his arm down the high street, and I had never once seen him offer that to anyone living.

We worked until the moon cleared the broken battlements. When the last spade of clay went down, he took off his hat, tipped it over the hole, and let the gloves drop in after it. "When nobody else would be her friend," he said, and his voice cracked the way old wood does, "someone has to do the job."

I still tell that to new apprentices, and they laugh the way I laughed then. But I walk the keep path most nights now, and there is always a pair of gloves hanging from the ivy by the chapel door, dry as paper, waiting for a partner.