Black and grey tattoos on a bare thigh and a hand holding a coffee mug, with two dogs asleep on white bedding beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey skull tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two tan dogs rest on white bedding while a person holds a dark enamel mug of coffee. A dense black and grey tattoo with ornamental patterning and a skull sits on the bare thigh, and a small tattoo is visible on the hand. The shading is soft and the composition is a relaxed overhead view.

Thigh Hand Skull Dog Coffee Mug Bed Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off the river since six, and by eleven the only stalls left on Greyhen Market were mine, a man selling bicycle bells, and the cheese woman, who had gone home early. I had a trestle of chipped enamel and a biscuit tin of brass buttons nobody wanted. My mug was the one with the blue rim, dented, which I'd drunk from for nine years because it kept the heat longer than anything else I owned.

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Her two lurchers came under my awning first, shaking water from their ears onto the tarpaulin, then folded themselves down on a coil of rope. The tan one put his chin on my boot and stayed there. Dell came after them, soaked to the elbows, carrying a shoebox wrapped in a carrier bag. She set it on the trestle beside the buttons and didn't open it. "My grandad's," she said. "Pocket watches. He engraved every case himself, and every one had a skull in the scrollwork, all ornament round the edge, like lace. I can't sell them. The dogs won't let me throw them out."

I opened the box. Inside, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, were eleven watches with their hands stopped at different hours. The skulls were tiny, grinning under curling leaves. I found the smallest, turned it over, and found a key rattling loose in the bottom of the box. I wound it. The second hand shivered and started. Dell watched it with her mouth shut tight, and the lurcher lifted his head and sighed the way old dogs do when something has finally gone right.

The rain thinned to nothing about then. I paid her what she asked, which was less than I wanted to give, and set my mug down on the wet trestle so I could hold the watch up to the last of the light and listen to it tick.