Traditional style tattoo of Zero, the ghost dog, in teal, red and black on a limb, with small dark bat shapes nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Zero the ghost dog in traditional style

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon ghost dog with a large round head, small black eyes and a wide smile, with wing-like ears and a flowing tail, is tattooed in bold black outlines. The shading is flat teal with lighter highlights, and a red collar sits below the head against the pale skin. Small dark shapes resembling bats and other marks appear at the lower edge of the frame.

Traditional Other Bat Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather in, gather in, and mind the lamp, for this one is about a hound that came down off the hill with no body to speak of, only a pale sheet of a face and a pair of ears that flapped like sails. Its collar was red, the red of the ribbon on Mrs Hollis's prize marrow, and it wore that collar the way a lord wears a sash. Nobody in Wyvenhall ever saw it eat. It only came down to the fair when the lamps were lit and the big wheel had stopped for the night.

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That year the fair belonged to a man called Tobias Crane, who had a moustache like two fishhooks and a debt he owed to the fellow who sold the candy floss. He was clever with his hands and a fool with money. The dog took a liking to the coconut shy. Every evening it sat beneath the stall with its tail curled round its paws, and every evening the coconuts tipped off their perches without anyone throwing a ball. By the second week Tobias had sold out of coconuts and nearly out of nerve.

On the last night, with the bats going over the ghost train like bunting, Tobias went out to the shy with a spade and a gleam in his eye. He meant to bury the sorry old thing under the sawdust. But when he raised the blade, the dog looked up at him with its small black eyes and its wide, knowing grin, and lifted one wing toward the cracked sign above the stall. Tobias read it by lamplight. It said, in his own handwriting, 'Free to the one who gives back what he took.'

He had taken those coconuts from a widow's orchard the spring before, and he had told no soul. The dog trotted off into the dark, the red collar bobbing, and Tobias, for the first time in his life, walked round to the orchard gate with his hat in both hands.