Pen drawing of a chimpanzee wearing a skull as a hat, with a brain and wispy tendrils above, shown as a tattoo design in black and grey stippling.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chimpanzee with skull and brain drawing

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a chimpanzee's head with a human-style skull resting on its head, a brain drawn above the skull, and thin wavy lines rising around them. The chimpanzee's face and fur are built from fine stippling and short hatched strokes, giving soft shading and texture. The image is black and grey on white paper, with three black pens placed in the upper left corner.

Dotwork Realism Skull Brain Monkey Tendril

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pryce kept a barge called the Patience moored below Limehouse, and in the winter of the great frost she kept a chimpanzee named Solomon who wore a borrowed skull on his head like a hat. The skull had come out of a dissecting room at Guy's and cost her two shillings and a bottle of gin. Solomon liked the weight of it. He would sit on the cabin roof for hours with his chin tucked and his eyes gone white with thinking, while the thin curls of smoke from the galley stove rose up round him.

Keep reading

The lightermen said the monkey was clever enough to count their barges and cheat at dominoes. Ada never argued. She knew he had once taken a brass key from a pawnbroker's apron and returned it to the right door. But the skull unsettled the watermen. One night a man called Tobias Greave came aboard drunk, wanting to buy the ape for a music hall, and when Solomon looked up at him from under the bone, Greave went white and stepped straight off the gangplank into the river.

Ada fished him out with a boathook. Greave lived, never drank again, and swore the monkey had looked clean through him and read every debt written behind his eyes. Ada sold nothing. In spring she lifted the skull off Solomon, boiled it in the copper until it was white as chalk, and buried it under the willow at Wapping, where the tide reaches at high water.

Solomon sat on the cabin roof after that, bareheaded, staring at the water. Some evenings the smoke still curled around him as though he were working hard at a problem, and Ada never asked him what it was. When the tide turned, he would lift one hand toward the willow and tip an imaginary hat to whatever lay beneath the mud.