Black and grey realism tattoo of a bird of prey, a skull and playing cards covering a forearm.

Bird of prey, skull and cards on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sleeve-style design covers the forearm, showing a bird of prey's head with a hooked beak and detailed eye at the top, with playing cards and a human skull beneath it. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, with strong contrast between deep blacks and soft greys. The design ends at the wrist with a dark checkered pattern, and the arm is shown against a grey t-shirt and a concrete floor.

Realism Forearm Skull Playing card Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk sat on the brass rail above the card table at the Gull and Lantern, hooded until the dealer lifted the cover, and then it looked at Ruth Calloway the way a bailiff looks at a man who owes money. Nobody in Wexford Row had seen it fly. Nobody had seen it eat either, but the bets kept coming in with cold fingers, and the chips kept sliding toward the middle.

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Ruth had dealt for thirty years. She knew the feel of a marked deck and the sound of a sleeve falling open. The bird knew too. Each time a player reached for a card it leaned forward and clicked its hooked beak, once, and the man would sit back and sweat. Old Pender lost his barge, then his brother's barge. The night he tried to palm an ace, the hawk dropped from the rail, plucked the card clean out of his hand, and laid it face up on the baize: the ace of spades, its corners bent like wings.

Ruth dealt the last hand herself just before midnight, the room empty but for the skull on the sideboard that Pender had lost years ago and never came back for. She turned her cards slowly. The hawk watched every one, then turned its head to the black window and the river beyond. Ruth stacked her chips, pushed them across the chequered floor, and walked out into the cold. Behind her the bird took the pot one coin at a time, and the skull grinned at nobody.