Black and grey dotwork tattoo on the upper arm showing two figures with bird skulls for heads, with the words NEVER TRUST THE LIVING between them.

Two bird-skulled figures with Never Trust the Living

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two long-coated figures with bird-skull heads facing each other, one holding a small object out towards the other. The figures are drawn with stippled dotwork shading and fine outlines, with the words NEVER TRUST THE LIVING set in plain capitals between them. The design is entirely black and grey and sits centrally on the inner upper arm against a plain background.

Dotwork Lettering Upper arm Figure Skeleton Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Skerrow Quay has not carried a living passenger since the spring tides took the slipway, so Mrs Ansell sends her cousin's boat across for the dead on Thursdays and nobody on the mainland asks why. I have the tiller on Thursdays now. My father had it before me, and the rule he taught me is painted above the wheelhouse door in green letters gone grey with salt: never trust the living with the fare.

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Last Thursday a woman in a long oilskin came down the steps with her skull held level, like a lantern she didn't want to spill. She already had the ticket, a little brass wheel stamped with a gull, and she pressed it into my palm before I could ask for it. She didn't want to cross, she said. She wanted to know whether the boy at the Gannet Inn was still breathing. I told her I didn't know, which was true, because the living don't tell me anything worth the crossing. She tapped the wheel twice against the rail and waited.

I should have sent her back up the steps. Instead I turned the wheel over in my bone fingers and found the stamp was worn smooth on one side, the way a coin goes when it has passed through too many hands. Someone living had spent it on her, and someone living would spend it again. I gave it back to her across the thwart.

She shook her head and folded my fingers over it. Keep it, she said. It only counts the living. We rowed out past the lobster pots with the tide slack and the water flat as a slate, and somewhere behind the breakwater a bell I could not hear began to ring for a boy who had not yet decided to die.