Traditional style colour tattoo of a snail with a skull-shaped shell and the words Death Comes Ripping around it, on a limb.

Skull-shell snail with Death Comes Ripping

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

The design shows a green snail whose spiral shell is shaded like a skull, with yellow eyes, a red and grey shell and black outlines. The lettering reads DEATH COMES above and RIPPING below, with red drop shadows on the letters. Bold black outlines, flat colour fills and soft red shading give it a classic old school look, and the design sits centred on the skin with plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell found the snail on her rhubarb at six, and by seven she had decided he belonged to Death. The shell was a skull, grey at the crown and blushing pink along the cheekbones, and he kept it turned toward the back door as though expecting a visitor. She named him Sexton after the man who dug the graves at St Wulfric's, and set a saucer of stale stout beside him to keep the wasps off.

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Every evening the lads from the chippy ran book on the garden wall, and every evening Sexton lost. He lost to a slug called Gerald, to a sparrow's egg that rolled off the bench, to the weather. Nobody could say how fast he went, only that he always arrived. Ada's grandson Tom said snails carried their houses, not their dead, and Ada said that was the trouble with houses.

On the Thursday the wind swung round off the sea and the sky turned the colour of wet slate. A thin man in a grey coat came up the path with a pocket watch open in his palm. He had been sent for a slow one, he said, and he sat on the back step to wait, tapping his boot against the flagstones while the kettle ticked on the stove.

Ada watched him check the watch and frown. Sexton had gone out before dawn for a heart of lettuce, and the silver trail he left ran under the cabbages and out of sight. "He'll be back by teatime," she said. "Or he won't, and then you'll have a long wait." The man looked at the trail, then at the saucer, then at her. "Gerald's been wanting a go at the job," she added, and dropped a crust on the wall for the sparrows.

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