Black and grey blackwork skull tattoo covering the back, with mandala ornament, dotwork on the upper arm and a geometric cross on the other arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey skull across a back piece

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the back, with mandala-style ornament above it, a geometric triangle and circle at the top, and patterned filigree around the edges. The skull's eye sockets and nasal cavity contain floral motifs, and the shading uses dense black fills with fine grey detailing. The image is in black ink and greys, and the composition is framed with dotwork patterning on the upper arm, a geometric cross and solid armbands on the other arm.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Back Upper arm Forearm Skull Mandala Floral Triangle Cross Armband Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The village had buried nine people that winter before anyone thought to ask Marta Hollin for anything but coffins. She lived at the edge of the birch wood, where the track gave out into moss, and she made her living from the bones the foxes brought her and the pale ones the ploughs turned up. Her skulls sat on every sill in the lane, grinning at the road.

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The priest's boy came one morning with a hare under his arm and asked why the dead went blind in the ground. Marta said they did not go blind, they only forgot where the light was. So she took the largest skull she had, a big old man's from the bog, and she painted the sockets with the flowers that grew in the wood: a ring of bramble, then a rosette of sorrel, then a star of pale gold lichen she scraped from the oaks. She drew a triangle inside a circle above the brow, because her mother had told her that was where a door could be found.

It took her the whole of Lent. When she set it on the sill, the village came down the lane one by one to look, and nobody spoke for a long while. Then old Sefton Rook, who had sold his wife's ring to pay the rent, put his hand on the cold crown and wept like a boy.

That spring the bramble pushed up through the floorboards of the empty cottage beside hers, and a bee built her comb inside the skull's left eye, humming there all summer. Marta said that was the door opening. Nobody in the village argued, and nobody let the sill go bare again.