Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a skull with purple, red, orange and green tendrils on the elbow, shown from two angles.

Colourful skull with tendrils on elbow

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold skull sits at the centre of the design, with its jaw open and its eye sockets shaded deep red and black. Thick black outlines define the bone and the wavy tendrils that spread from the skull, and the shading moves through red, orange and purple. A green, tendril-like base sits below the skull, and a black and grey cartoon face and partial script appear above it in the same frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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You will not believe what Tam hauled up off the Scarp this morning, and I have told him to keep it out of the kitchen until you have seen it. It was tangled in the pot line with a fistful of wrack, a skull the size of a cabbage, and the bone of it was furred over with anemones so thick I could not find the eye holes at first. Red and orange they were, the colour of the sky over Sandy Cove last August, with a green fringe along the jaw where the weed had got in. Tam swore it had been sitting on the shelf in the net loft since before the lifeboat house went up.

I scrubbed it at the sink with a bristle brush and a bowl of vinegar, which was a mistake, because the anemones folded shut at the first splash and went hard as wax. Underneath, somebody had scratched a small triangle into the crown and beneath it the letters H.V. and a year I could not read without my glasses. Old Mrs Pascoe at the chandlery says the Vane girl walked into the sea in 1841 with her father's compass in her apron, and that nobody ever found her, only her shoes on the slipway.

So this morning I took it back out to the Scarp at low water, wrapped in your good tea towel, and set it down in the big rock pool where the weed grows thickest. I did not say anything. I just stood with the wind pulling at my scarf until the tide came round the point and lifted the water over its teeth. When I looked again the anemones had opened, every one, and they were the only bright thing on the whole grey shore.

Come home at Easter. The kettle is on and I have left the lid off the tide table for you.

Love, Mae

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