Black and white line drawing of a skull wearing a spiked crown, with a cigarette in its teeth and oak leaves and acorns at its base, in a flash design style.

Crowned skull with cigarette and oak leaves

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A skull wears a spiked crown with a spade motif at its centre and smokes a cigarette, with smoke rising in stippled dots toward the upper right. Oak leaves, acorns and a stem sit beneath the jaw and frame the lower half of the skull. The drawing uses fine hatched and stippled linework in black on a cream background, with faint show-through text from the reverse of the page visible behind it.

Traditional Skull Crown Cigarette Smoke Acorn Spade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down on the hatch and mind the rope, for this is the tale of the King of Spades, who had no kingdom but the back cabin of the Mary Ellen, a narrowboat that never once saw the sea. Thirty years he worked the Grand Union with a tin of loose tobacco and an oak sprig tucked behind one ear, and he wore a crown of bent brass that the lock-keeper's daughter had soldered together as a joke.

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Now the king's trouble was that he could not lose. Every lock-keeper from Braunston to Brentford knew it, so they stopped playing him for money and started playing him for stories. One wet October a stranger came down the towpath with a deck of cards wrapped in oilcloth and asked for a game. The king rolled his cigarette, let the smoke drift up in little grey specks toward the poplars, and said he'd stake the boat.

They played until the lamp guttered. The stranger dealt him the spade, then the spade again, and each card turned up a little more worn than the last, until the king saw his own face blurring on the pasteboard. The crown grew heavy on his head, and the oak leaves in his hair began to drop their acorns onto the cabin boards, one at a time, like a clock counting down.

Here's the bit I always tell slow. The king laid down his last card, and it was the ace of his own name, and the stranger smiled and said the boat was his. The king stepped off onto the towpath with nothing but his cigarette still burning. He walked all the way to Brentford, and the mud took his boots and the fog took his name. If you go down to the wharf on a still night, you'll see the Mary Ellen moving without a soul at the tiller, a smoke ring curling off her stern, and a brass crown resting on the hatch where I'm sitting now.