Black linework tattoo of a skull with a radish sprouting from its head and the word VEGAN beneath it, on the calf.

Skull and radish on a calf

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo shows a skull with a radish growing from its crown, its leafy top spreading above and its root tapering down past the jaw. The word VEGAN sits below in outlined, angular capitals. The design uses black ink only, with fine hatching and stippling for shading, and it is shown against a yellow background with a blue striped sock and dark shoe at the bottom of the frame.

Other Skull Vegetable Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spade turned him up the same week my radishes bolted, which Mrs Abernethy said was the Lord's way of telling me to stop feeding the dead. I told her the dead had never complained about my peas. She sniffed and went back to her hymn sheets.

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He was lying a foot under the wet clay at the far end of the churchyard, where the yew roots had got into the old paupers' plot, grinning the way they all grin once the flesh has gone off to find better company. I carried him to the shed in a feed sack and set him on the bench among the seed trays. I will admit I talked to him. A man who has dug graves for forty years gets like that.

By the second week there was a radish growing out of the crown of his head. Not a weed, not a root that had wandered in from the hedge. A proper red-skinned radish, its leaves spread over the brow like a bad wig, its tail slipping down through the gap where his jaw had been. I pulled it once. The next morning it was back, twice the size, and the skull had the cheek of a man who has been well fed.

Mrs Abernethy saw it and crossed herself twice. I did not argue. I had been living on nothing but roots since Michaelmas and was in no position to judge a man for his diet. At the harvest fete I set the crop out on a trestle with a card in my best hand. The skull sat at the end of the table, grinning at the buyers, and when the vicar asked what the word beneath the vegetable was for, I told him it was the skull's own idea. In forty years he has never once been wrong about a radish.