Traditional style tattoo of a skeletal hand in a pinch gesture with the words THE END beside it, shaded with dotwork on a leg.

Skeleton hand with THE END lettering

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A skeletal hand is shown in a pinch gesture with its fingers curled, bordered by a bold black outline. The bones are filled with grey shading built from stippled dots, with the words THE END set in block capitals to the left. Partial tattoos in red and green sit at the left and right edges of the frame against a plain blue background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke. Yes, you can have the ending first, everybody does. The old ferryman scratched it on his cap rim so nobody could argue: THE END. That is where the story stops, but it is not where it starts, and I will not be hurried by a crowd of tourists with cold chips.

Keep reading

Eachann Ruadh mended nets on Skerrow for fifty winters. His father had carved him a needle from a sheep's shoulder blade, and he held it the way you would hold a sprat you meant to let go, finger to thumb, very delicate. Every evening he sat in the net loft with the lamp hung from a nail and stitched the day's tears, and every evening the wind came up the cliff and rattled the shutters like a man wanting in.

In the spring of thirty-one the Mary Ann went out for the last of the mackerel and did not come back. The sea gave up the hull at Port Ban and a single cork float, but nothing of him. The needle turned up later, wedged in the drift at the high-water mark, its eye still threaded with brown linen. Nobody on the island would touch it. Morag, the schoolmaster's girl, picked it up anyway, and she was the one who finished the mending he had left half done.

She sewed the last seam of the Mary Ann's old sail into a shroud for the church door, pinched the needle the way he had, and ran the thread through clean. Then she tied it off and cut the cord with her teeth, and that was the only ending Skerrow ever agreed on. Mind your fingers on the lamp, now. The ferry leaves at seven.

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