Pencil sketch flash of three bitten circular designs with crossing lines and dots, labelled Fantastic, Allons-y and Geronimo, with no body placement shown.

Three bitten circle sketches with phrases

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch shows three circular designs, each with a bite mark taken from its edge and filled with crossing lines, small circles and dots. Each design has a short phrase written beside it: Fantastic, Allons-y and Geronimo. The drawing is in black graphite on white paper with light, simple linework and no shading.

Circle Lettering Sketch Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the tin beneath the third flagstone of the chapel at Harrowgate Keep, where the roof gave up years ago and the rain has been writing on the stone. Inside, wrapped in wax paper gone soft as cloth, are three round biscuits, each with a bite taken from its edge. Someone has written on each wrapper in pencil, in the square capitals of a man who expected to be remembered. You have climbed the spiral stair to read them, and nobody has been up here since the lamps went out in the gatehouse.

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Mrs Pennock baked them the night before the Ashby men came over the moat. Her husband Tobias was on the north wall with the bowmen, and she sent the tin up with the last of the lard and a note telling the boys to share. The first to bite was Hal Fenwick, who wrote Fantastic on his paper because the biscuit was, he said, the best thing he had eaten since Michaelmas. Young Ned Marsh wrote Allons-y, because he had learned a few words of French from a travelling tinker and fancied himself a soldier of the king's own. Then there was Dickon, who wrote Geronimo, went over the parapet at dawn with a rope and a yell, and was never seen again.

The bites are not hunger. They mark the three moments each man decided to stop eating and start climbing, the same small crescent taken from the rim each time. You turn the third biscuit over in your palm and count the dots pressed into its face, the lines scored across it like rope, the little round marks where the sugar caught the light.

You close the tin. Outside, the crows are already arguing over the wall, and somewhere below the river keeps saying the same thing it always said.