Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo of a crowned skull and a compass over a map, across a forearm and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crowned skull and compass sleeve on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A crowned skull with wisps of smoke-like shading sits above a compass rose set over a faded map. The shading is detailed and smooth, with fine linework in the crown and compass and soft grey gradients across the bone. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Upper arm Skull Crown Compass Map Smoke

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

The last northbound train has gone, and you are left on Platform Four of a station nobody has repainted since the war. The clock reads twenty to midnight, though it has read that since March. Dessie Marr, the porter, sweeps around your boots with a broom older than both of you and tells you the map on the wall is wrong. It shows lines running to towns the Board closed in 1963, and the little black dots that mark the stations have been painted over with ash.

Keep reading

You take out the brass compass your grandmother carried through two wars and open it under the sodium light. The needle will not settle. It swings towards the left-luggage office, then towards the stairs leading down to the tunnel, then back to you, as if you were the thing it has been looking for. Dessie leans on his broom and nods at the poster above the ticket hall, where a crowned king in grey ink is half swallowed by smoke pouring from his jaw. "He had the same trouble," Dessie says. "Took him a week to stop arguing with the needle."

You follow the needle down into the tunnel, where the smoke from a dead engine hangs in ribbons over the rails. At the far end is a waiting room with a single bench and a skull resting on a velvet cushion, a paper crown pinned crookedly to its brow. Beside it lies a timetable with one entry, printed in faded type, bearing your name and a departure time that has already passed.

The compass needle stops shaking. The rails begin to hum, and a light swells out of the tunnel mouth. Dessie appears at your shoulder, cap in hand, and says what he always says at the edge of the platform. "Mind the gap." For once, you do.