Large black and grey dotwork skull tattoo with cracked bone detail on the upper leg, shown beside a pair of white shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cracked skull on the upper leg

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large human skull fills most of the frame, with deep black eye sockets, a dark nasal cavity and a full row of teeth. The skull is built from fine stippled dots and clean black outlines, with heavier shadow along one side and thin cracks running across the cranium and jaw. The ink is entirely black and grey on a bare leg, with the shorts and a dark background at the edges of the shot.

Dotwork Blackwork Thigh Skull Crack Teeth Bone

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

Sit closer to the stove, the lot of you, and mind the cat, because this is the part where Old Hobb's dog started howling at the frozen furrow. It was the hard January of the year the Thrale brothers sold up, and the ground at Cold Harrow Farm had gone to iron. Hobb went out with a mattock to break the top of the ditch for the water, and what the blade turned up was not a stone.

Keep reading

It was a skull, and not an ordinary one. The top of it had a crack running clean across like a plate dropped on a flagstone, and the jaw had split too, so the teeth sat in it grinning at the sky as if they'd heard a good joke about the weather. Hobb said the stippling on the bone was like frost on a window, each little dot put there by somebody with more patience than sense. He carried it up to the kitchen in a sack and set it on the dresser beside the clock, and the clock stopped that same night, and nobody in that house has ever called it a coincidence.

Now here is the strange part. Every morning after, the skull had moved a finger's width toward the door. Hobb blamed the mice. His wife blamed Hobb. The girl who came to help with the lambing, Ada Pell, said the dead want to be buried facing the field they worked, so she took it down to the churchyard in the snow with her own two hands and laid it in the old Thrale plot, facing east, where the sun comes up over the barley.

The clock started again in the spring. That's all I know of it, and all the old ones know, and if you ask me what it meant, I'll tell you the ground had been owed something and had finally been paid.