Black and white flash design of a coffin with a central skull, flourishes and a block of lettering on a speckled background, in a lettering style.

Coffin with skull and lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows an upright coffin with a central skull between curled flourishes, with several lines of white lettering set in blocky and script-like typefaces inside the black shape. The linework is bold and solid, with hatched shading along the left edge of the coffin and a scratchy, textured outline. The image is entirely black and white against a light, speckled background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Coffin Skull Lettering Flourish Text Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the Crooked Lantern, off Tanner's Row, the two of them had been spitting and quarrelling since the lamplighters came round. Tom Harrow and Ada Vine had fought over every wager since they were children in the same tenement, and neither would give up a point, not even when the candle guttered and the landlord, Mr Sallow, set the jug down between them with a look that said it was the last one.

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'Whatever's in that won't be the death of me,' Tom said. 'I've outlived two landlords and a cholera summer.' Ada laughed, took the jug, and drank. Mr Sallow had cut his spirit with something from the chemist on Gull Street to make it stretch, and everyone in the room could taste it was wrong, though nobody said so aloud. He wiped his hands on his apron and went out the back.

Eli Crane, the cooper, was fetched at first light to measure them both. He had built boxes for the parish for thirty years and could tell a bad stave by its sound. He stood in the doorway with his rule and his pencil and said what a man says when he is paid by the foot. 'Tall one, is it? Then I'll make you a box with room for your opinions.'

Ada, who had sworn she would never be bound to anyone's rules, asked him to leave her lid plain. Tom wanted a diamond cut into the top and a skull in the middle, so the words would go down with him and nobody could say he had gone quietly. Eli scored the boards and drove the nails, and through the new wood he could still hear them arguing about who had poured the first glass, until the last nail went home and the room went still.