Realism tattoo covering a man's back, made to look like cracked carved stone with a medallion, two cherubs and a skull on a placement across the back.

Carved stone back piece with skull and cherubs

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows cracked, weathered stone panels with ornate carved borders. A central medallion holds a seated figure with a bow and Roman numerals, and below it a skull sits between two kneeling cherubs in a recessed niche. The shading is detailed and high contrast in grey and black, with a small green leaf sprig in the upper right adding the only colour.

Realism Back Stone Crack Medallion Clock Figure Skull Cherub Leaf Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the rain has got into the north transept again. Mr Pryce rang at eight to say the bishop wants the monument finished before the Easter visitors, which leaves me three weeks to bring a dead wool merchant's clock back to life. Abel Strand, died 1743. His memorial is a wall of cracked stone panels with a round face in the middle where the hours should be. Someone in the nineteenth century painted the numerals black, and nobody has touched them since.

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The seated figure inside the medallion is the real trouble. Half his bow has sheared away and the cloth at his knee has gone to grey lichen. I spent the afternoon with a dental pick and a soft brush, not touching the cracks, only easing the grit out of them. My old master used to say a crack is the stone's own diary and you do not write over it.

Below, the skull sits in its niche between two cherubs who have been leaning in to it for three hundred years. Eileen from the flower guild asked whether they were comforting him or teasing him. I said the mason never wrote it down. Walking home along the river, I decided the cherubs had the right idea about the dead, though I kept that to myself.

This morning there was a green shoot in the crack just above the medallion, no longer than my thumb, the first thing to grow in that wall since the Regency. I could have picked it out in ten seconds. Instead I left it where it was and propped the scaffold board back in place. Mr Pryce can take it up with the bishop.