Red line drawing of a skull with an eyepatch and crossed blades, dripping blood, above the words If you dare hurt my friends, I won't forgive you.

Skull with eyepatch and crossed blades

Colour · Flash

A red line drawing of a grinning skull wearing an eyepatch, with two crossed blades behind it. Blood-like drips and splatter run down the design, and a quotation sits beneath the skull in a handwritten-style font. The artwork uses a single red ink on a white background with no shading.

Skull Blood Drip Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tobias Marl kept the Grey Cross orchard for thirty years, and in all that time nobody had stolen a windfall from it without being sorry. The late summer after his brother died, the apples came in heavy and red, and boys from the mill town began climbing the wall after dark. Tobias did not chase them. He sat on an upturned crate by the gate with his oiled cutlasses across his knees, the eyepatch pushed up on his forehead, and waited.

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On the ninth night a girl of about twelve came over the wall instead, barefoot, with an empty sack. She was Ada, his brother's youngest, and she had not eaten since Tuesday. Tobias looked at her for a long while. Then he stood, stiff in the knees, filled her sack with the bruised fruit and a heel of bread, and told her to bring the mill boys with her next time, because the apples were not his to keep alone.

The next week the boys came in a sheepish row, and Tobias made them sit under the trees while he showed them which fruit to take and which to leave for the wasps. That night he painted a line across the gatepost in the red his brother used for marking hives. Beneath it he wrote, in letters a child could read: If you dare hurt my friends, I won't forgive you.

Nobody in the district read it aloud without laughing, and nobody touched the orchard again. Ada kept the trees herself after he died. When children asked why the gatepost bore a threat in red paint, she only said it was a promise, and that in all her years it had never once been broken.