Traditional-style flash design of three orange carrots with green tops, wrapped in two banners reading REAL FOOD HAS MUD and NOT BLOOD, with no body placement shown.

Three carrots with banner design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of three carrots with green leafy tops, bunched together and wrapped by two curled banners. The banners carry the words REAL FOOD HAS MUD and NOT BLOOD in bold black lettering, and small brown flecks of soil surround the carrots. The bold black outlines and sketchy shading are set against flat orange and green colour with white highlights.

Traditional Banner Lettering Vegetable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward came up the lane the morning the frost gave up the ground, and found Hannah Pell on her knees in the carrot bed, working the mud off a root with her thumb. He wanted the tithe, as every house in the valley owed it: a ham, a lamb, or a side of salted pork for the lord's table. Hannah had none of those. She pulled three carrots from the bed, shook them, and held them out to him.

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He laughed at her. The lord's table wanted blood, he said, and meat that had once been alive. Hannah told him to bite one first. He did it to shame her, and then he did not laugh, because the carrot was cold and sweet and cracked clean between his teeth. He asked how she kept them. She said the earth gives back what you put into it, and that was all the secret there was.

He carried the three carrots up to the hall anyway, because a steward takes what he is given. That winter the lord's men had eaten nothing but grey salt pork from the cellar, and their gums had gone soft and their legs had swollen. The cook set the carrots on the table in a copper pan, and the lord ate three of them before he noticed what he was eating.

Every spring after that the steward came back down the lane, but he came on foot now, with his own boots caked to the ankle. He never asked for a ham again. He only stood at the edge of Hannah's bed with an empty basket and waited for her to pull the first ones up.