Colour tattoo of a red apple shaped as a skull with blue dripping ink and a purple watercolour splash, neo-traditional style, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Apple skull with blue drips on the side

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a skull formed from a red apple with a gold-tipped stem, with empty eye sockets and a dark nasal cavity. Blue ink runs down from the base of the skull in drips, and a soft purple wash sits behind the design. Bold black outlines and smooth shading give the apple a glossy, rounded finish, and the design fills the frame against the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Ribs Apple Skull Drip Watercolour splash Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last apple on the Ruddock tree hung just out of reach, and you stood on the second rung of the ladder with bonfire smoke curling purple over the wall. Your grandmother shouted from the scullery that the windfalls would not pick themselves. You had been told never to touch that one. Nobody picks the Ruddock's last fruit, she said, not until the frost has come and gone, so it had hung there all October, glossy and red, while the wasps gave up on it and the blackbirds would not go near.

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Your fingers closed round it at last and it came away with a small wet sigh, its gold-tipped stalk snapping clean. It was heavier than an apple had any right to be, and warm, as though it had been sitting in the sun rather than under the leaves. In the scullery your grandmother looked up from the sink, saw what you held, and went very quiet. She told you to put it on the windowsill and wash your hands.

You did not wash your hands. You took the bread knife and cut it on the board, expecting white flesh and pips, and the blade went through with a dry click, like teeth. The halves fell open. Where the core should have been there was a grin of bone, two hollow eyes looking up at you, and from the nose and jaw ran a slow blue liquid that dripped off the board onto the flagstones the way ink runs from a split pen.

Your grandmother did not scold. She wrapped both halves in newspaper and set them on the slate shelf in the cold larder, beside the butter. By morning the flagstones beneath were blue to the grout, and the apple had gone a pale purple at its crown, as if it had been breathing all night. You never saw her throw it out.