Black and grey traditional dotwork tattoo on the upper arm showing a toothed creature, a beaked figure in a plaid shirt and a spider web.

Toothed creature and beaked figure with spider web

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open-mouthed creature with rows of teeth sits on the left, facing a beaked figure in a checked shirt on the right, with a spider web between them. The linework is bold and solid, and the background is filled with fine stippled dots that frame the scene inside a dotted arc. The design is entirely black ink in greys and black, with no colour, shown on a pale arm against a dark top.

Traditional Dotwork Upper arm Creature Teeth Spider web

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The toll-keeper at Ferrin bridge had a beak like a heron's and wore a checked waistcoat his mother had stitched for him. Every traveller paid him one word of their own name, and every traveller got across, because that was the rule the river had agreed to long before anyone could remember.

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One autumn a carter came down from the hills with a cart of wet salt and would not give his name. He said he was called Nobody, which made the keeper laugh, and the carter laughed too, and then they both stopped laughing. Under the bridge the river rose up and opened its long grey jaws, rows of teeth pale as bone, and it waited for the wheels to stop. Between the keeper and the water the spiders from the stonework had strung a web across the gap, and it shook each time the river breathed.

The carter sat on his barrel until dusk. Then he asked the keeper what a name was worth if the river already knew it. The keeper said he did not know, for nobody had ever asked him that. So the carter pulled one thread from the web, wound it three times round his wrist, and said a word so quietly that the keeper never afterwards could say what it was. The river shut its mouth on nothing but cold air and a quarrel of crows.

In the morning the keeper found a sack of salt on his step with a coin inside it, and beside the coin a single thread stretched across the bridge, too fine to see unless the light was low. He left it there. Travellers still pay him in words, but now he asks them for something they will never miss, and the river has never once complained.