Black and grey realistic skull tattoo on a lower leg, with cracked bone detail and angular shapes above it.

Cracked skull on lower leg

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the lower leg, with a cracked cranium, hollow eye sockets and a wide open jaw showing teeth. The skull is shaded in soft greys with deep black areas and pale highlights, giving it a three-dimensional look. Angular light and dark shapes extend up the leg above the skull, and the background shows a green and grey surface.

Realism Calf Skull Crack Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit close, because the lightning came down on the Tuesday, and anyone who tells you otherwise was asleep in the Crown. It split the old yew at the top of St Aldhelm's churchyard clean down the middle, the way you'd split a loaf, and out of the roots rolled a skull as big as a copper pan, with a crack running across its brow like the glaze on an old plate.

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Walter Pyle, who dug graves for the parish and had never once been startled by the dead, picked it up with his bare hands and carried it to the forge. Mrs Oddy at the post office swore it was still warm. Ted Marsh, the smith, set it on the anvil and told the boys to stop their gawping. But the jaw hung open, wide as a letterbox, all those teeth grinning at the rafters, and nobody could bring themselves to shut it.

Ted tried. He had a vice and a pair of pliers and a notion that a jaw is only a hinge, and hinges can be mended. Each night he came down to find it open a little wider, and the firelight lay across the cheekbones like the black edges of a broken window. By Christmas the children would not walk past the forge after dark.

So here is the end of it, and you can make of it what you like. In March, when the thunder came over the Downs, the skull's mouth moved. Ted swore he heard it finish a word he'd been waiting his whole life to hear, but he never would say what the word was, and he took it with him to the grave. They buried him beside the yew on a grey wet morning, and the skull went in with him. Nobody dug it up again, and the jaw, I'm told, is still open.