Traditional-style tattoo of a red cowboy-hatted skull with a red bandana and cigarette on a forearm, with a red arrow below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cowboy skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skull wearing a red cowboy hat and red neckerchief, with a cigarette between its teeth, sits at the centre of the design. Bold black outlines define the hat, skull and bandana, with solid red fills, grey shading on the skull and red sunburst lines behind it. The tattoo fills most of the frame on the forearm, with a red arrow and part of another dark design visible at the bottom.

Traditional Forearm Skull Bandana Cigarette Arrow Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cigarette had gone out twice before Eli Corrie remembered to ask the bosun for a light, and by then the Maud Halloran was three days out of Liverpool with the Atlantic heaving under her like something asleep and resenting it. Corrie was the ship's carpenter, which meant he sewed canvas, patched the sails and, when the doctor was drunk, held the lamp. He also had a tin of red lake paint from a Birkenhead chandler and a sail needle he sharpened every night on a whetstone.

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The drawing was Hollis's work. Hollis was a stoker from Abilene who lost at cards with the same good humour he showed at the coal chute, and he had sketched the skull on the back of a cargo manifest with a stub of carpenter's pencil. A skull in a cowboy hat, he said, with a bandana knotted at the throat and smoke curling from its teeth. The hat had to be red. Corrie argued that a dead man ought to look dead. Hollis laughed and said that was exactly why he should be smoking.

They worked in the lamp room with the sea groaning through the bulkhead. Each time the hull rolled the needle skipped, and Corrie learned to brace his elbow on a coil of marline and wait for the ship to settle. By the fourth night the sunburst was done, red rays fanning out behind the skull like a dawn over country he had never seen. He sat back and found his hands were steadier than they had been since Liverpool.

When the Maud Halloran tied up at Galveston in June, Hollis came down the gangway with his duffel and stopped in front of him. He studied the skull for a long moment, then tapped a cigarette from his shirt pocket and held it out. "Well," he said, "now you've got somewhere to ride."