Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing a snarling demon face, a skeletal hand and skulls among smoke-like shapes.

Demon face sleeve with skeletal hand

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve runs from the upper arm down the forearm, centred on a snarling demonic face with glowing pale eyes and a skeletal hand reaching up beside it. Skulls, wisps of smoke and a small star on the shoulder fill the surrounding space. The shading is smooth and highly detailed, with strong contrast and soft gradients, and the arm is shown in a dim room against a plain grey wall.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Demon Skull Smoke Star Biomechanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hand came up through the smoke first, long and bone-white, fingers curled as if it wanted to take hold of the lamp. Marta had painted it that way on the wall of the boathouse years ago, and nobody in Porthgwidden had ever asked her why. She stood in the doorway with the rain running off her hood and watched the old man at the bench turn the sleeve of his coat back to show her the arm beneath.

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"Forty years I've carried him," Tobias said. "Since the winter the Emmeline went down off the Brisons. He came up out of the water beside me, that's how I tell it. Face like a drowned man's, eyes lit from inside."

She had heard the story from her grandmother, who said the face belonged to nobody in the harbour and everybody, a sea-thing that took one man each generation and let the rest go home. Marta had never believed it. She believed the skulls, though, the little grinning ones tucked among the smoke, because she had seen the old fishermen's graves on the headland and counted them.

"Why come to me now?" she asked.

He pulled the sleeve higher, past the star on his shoulder, and she saw the skin there had gone soft and grey. "Because he's been reaching for something for four decades," he said, "and I want to know what it is before I go under."

She took up the needle and the black ink, and she did not tell him that the hand had never been reaching for anything at all. It had only been waiting for someone to look at it properly.