Black and grey abstract skull tattoo with loose brush-like strokes on the outer thigh.

Abstract skull on the thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A skull is rendered in soft grey shading with a sweeping black stroke curving around it. The loose, painterly strokes fade into the skin at the top, while the lower edge has a sharper, darker sweep. The photo is taken close up, with a hand holding the leg at the top of the frame.

Thigh Skull Abstract Brushstroke

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spade turns up the skull just after the rain stops, half-buried under the roots of the damson tree at the bottom of the garden. It is the colour of weak tea and cracked across the brow, and a black root has grown through one eye socket like a brushstroke that refused to dry. You kneel in the wet clay and wipe the bone with your sleeve. Somewhere above you the Pryce boy's kite snags in the chestnut and tears loose, and you do not look up.

Keep reading

Mr Pryce comes to the fence with his secateurs still in hand. He says the woman who lived here before the war planted foxgloves along the path so nobody would dig that corner, and that she painted in black ink on rice paper every evening at the kitchen table, swirling the brush until the strokes ran off the page. He doesn't know her first name. He only remembers the smell of turpentine and the way she always wrote the date in the top corner, backwards, as if the years were coming toward her.

That night you go back with a torch and a trowel. The root is not a root at all. When you tease the soil from its length you find it is a line of fine black ink that runs in a long curve down the bank and into the rockery, where it stops beneath a flat stone. You lift the stone. Under it lies a folded sheet of paper, the ink still dark, and a single word written in a hand that leans as if it is running. It is your own name.

In the morning you put the skull back where it lay, pressing the earth gently over it, and scatter foxglove seed along the path. The wind comes up off the field and bends the young stalks all one way, across the bed and over the stone, like a brush finishing a stroke it was always going to finish.