Black and grey drawing of a skeletal marching band drum major with a plumed hat and baton, beside lettering reading I am not afraid to keep on living.

Skeleton drum major with lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A skeleton in a plumed shako hat and military-style jacket with braided trim strikes a high-kick marching pose while holding a baton. Two blocks of hand-drawn lettering surround the figure, reading I am NOT afraid to keep on Living and I am NOT afraid to walk this world alone. The drawing uses fine pencil-like linework and soft grey shading on a plain white background, with no colour.

Lettering Skeleton Plume Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Pardoe unlocked the back door of Pardoe's Bakery at ten to five and found the skeletons of a marching band already waiting in the yard, lined up between the bread racks and the bins as if someone had called them to attention. Her grandfather's plumed shako sat on the proving shelf. Nobody had put it there.

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She had been told as a child that the Wick Lane Silver Band had marched the route past the chapel every Remembrance Sunday until the last of its players went into the ground, and that the drum major, a man called Stanley Hobday, had never once lost his nerve on the corner by the post box. Nell had always thought it was the sort of story people told to sell scones.

"Right then," she said to the row of bones. "Dough won't wait for anybody." The drum major tapped his baton twice against his boot, lifted one leg high, and pointed it at the oven door, as though the matter were settled. So she shaped forty cobs, scored them with a razor, and slid them into the heat, while the band stood in the flour-dusted lamplight, not moving, not afraid of anything at all.

At six the first delivery van pulled up. The yard was empty by then, but a fine dusting of white lay across the cobbles in the shape of a kick. Nell swept it into the bin and left the shako where it was. By the end of the month the loaves were rising higher than they ever had, and she had stopped telling herself it was the yeast.