Black and white engraved design of a face split down the middle inside a rope-twist circle, with Valar Morghulis and Valar Dohaeris lettering around the edge.

Split face emblem with Valar Morghulis lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A circular emblem shows a face divided vertically, with the left half filled in solid black and the right half left white and shaded with fine dot and line work. A twisted rope border frames the face, and the words VALAR MORGHULIS and VALAR DOHAERIS run around the outer ring. The image is entirely in black and white with high contrast and a clean, centred composition.

Face Circle Lettering Emblem Engraving

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass disc lived in my jacket pocket for thirty-one years, worn smooth on the dark side where my thumb rubbed it. My uncle Tom had it struck at the Hollin Lodge the spring the low seam came in with water, and he pressed it into my palm on the cage platform the morning I started as a deputy. One face was black as the coal we cut, the other bright as a new penny. A man should look at both before he goes below, he said.

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Nobody in the village agreed on what the rope ring meant. Dad said it was the winding cable. The minister said it was a sailor's knot pattern. Mrs Pryce swore it was the rope they used to lower the dead. Tom only laughed and pointed at the words round the edge, which he had painted on the lodge door himself from a battered paperback a lodger left behind. All men must die, said one ring. All men must serve, said the other. He reckoned that was the whole of a working life in two lines, and anything more was just talk over the pints.

The winter I turned forty, the lamp room caught fire and seven men were kept down for four days. Tom was one of them. When the rescue team broke through, he was last out, soot in every crease, and he stood at the cage looking at the disc in my hand. He asked for it back. He turned it over, dark side up, and gave it to me again. Keep the black side, he said. You'll need to know how to lose the light.

Tom died in his bed twelve years later, which he would have counted as a kindness. The bright side has worn to a blur now, but the dark side keeps its edge. Every shift I press my thumb to the rope and count the twists. There are always thirty-one. I have never once reached the end of them before the bell rings.