Black and grey tattoo covering a forearm, with the word Money in script, a skull, smoky shapes and bare branches, reaching down toward the hand.

Black and grey skull and smoke forearm sleeve

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo runs from the elbow to the wrist, with the word Money in script near the top and fragments of other lettering further down. Below it, a skull sits within swirling smoke-like forms and bare branches, with shadowed areas that fade into the hand. The shading is greyscale with soft gradients and dark outlines, and the design fills the arm in a tall, vertical composition.

Forearm Hand Money Script Lettering Skull Smoke Branches Tree Hand Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ronnie,

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The chimney at the Hallam works has been smoking since Tuesday and nobody in Carrow Bridge will say why. Mr Pell at the chapel says the foundry men have been burning old pattern sheets, and the widows are saying something else entirely. The elm by the lych gate has dropped its last leaves and stands up now like a row of bare fingers. You'd hate it. You always said the place had no colour in it, and you were right, though I'd not tell you so to your face.

I've taken your room above the milliner's, the one with the sloping ceiling, because the rent is less than the bank wanted for the shop. Mrs Tully downstairs wants to know where you've gone and I've told her Leeds, which is where you said you'd be. There was a bundle of your papers under the floorboard, the ledger with the pages cut out and your neat little sums down the margins. I've left them as they lay. What stopped me was the last page, where you'd written MONEY across the top and underlined it three times, and under that just the one word, THE, and then nothing.

Nobody has come asking. A man in a grey car did come once, asking after a skull ring, which I thought a strange thing to want from a clerk. I said I knew nothing of rings. He left a card with a drawing of a smoking skull on it and said you'd know the trade.

Write back, or come home. I'll keep the lamp lit in the window, though the smoke from the works is thick enough now that I doubt anyone could see it from the road.

Yours, Edie