Black and grey realism tattoo of a skeletal drum major in a plumed shako hat and baton, with lettering above and below, on the side of the ribs.

Skeleton drum major on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal figure in a plumed shako hat and military-style jacket strides across the side of the ribs, holding a baton in one raised hand with the other arm bent. The figure is rendered with soft shading and fine tonal gradations in black and grey, giving the bones and fabric folds depth. The words MAY DEATH sit in an arc above the figure and NEVER STOP YOU is set in a straight line below, both in a black serif-style lettering.

Realism Ribs Skeleton Plume Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Haddow wedding was going to be a short band, because the mill brass had lost two players to the flu and the fiddler had gone to his daughter's in Carlisle. So on the Friday before, Mrs Pell walked up to the churchyard with a flask of tea and asked old Ambrose Tull, who had led the Whitsun parade for fifty years and been buried in the spring, whether he would stand in one more time. She said she would leave the gate on the latch. She did not say what she expected to happen after that.

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On the Saturday the bride's brother kicked the first beat off the church steps and the band came out behind him, eleven of them in red and four of them only half in their trousers. At the head of the column walked a tall figure in a blue tunic gone the colour of wet slate, with a black plume on his shako and a baton he held high at every turn. Nobody looked at his face for long. The jaw was bare and the grin was all teeth, and the buttons on his coat sat on nothing. Mrs Pell said he had always been particular about his step, and that was the only thing anyone said about it.

The procession went round the green twice and into the Crown, where the tables were pushed back and the bride's father wanted a waltz. The drum major would not have a waltz. He stamped his heel and lifted his knee the way Ambrose always had, and the band went with him, faster and faster, until the bridesmaids had their shoes off and the vicar was clapping on the off-beat. Near midnight the music stopped on its own. The plume lay on the flagstones beside a pair of empty boots, and the baton rested across the bass drum as neatly as if someone had set it down to rest.

Mrs Pell took the baton home and put it in the cupboard under the stairs. Every Whitsun since, someone has found a blade of cut grass pressed flat inside the case, and nobody has ever owned up to putting it there.