Black and grey drawing of a skull built from US dollar bill engraving, with a pyramid eye, ornate scrollwork and the word HATE across the teeth.

Dollar bill skull design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and grey drawing of a human skull whose eye sockets, cheek and jaw are filled with engraved banknote motifs, including a pyramid with an eye, a large numeral one, and an ornate border of scrollwork and foliage. The skull itself is shaded with smooth tonal gradients and fine hatching, while the banknote elements use dense, crisp linework. The composition is centred on a plain white background, with the phrase IN GOD WE TRUST across the top of the cranium and HATE set on a banner across the lower teeth.

Realism Skull Dollar bill Pyramid Eye Scrollwork Banknote Foliage Engraving

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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

You spend the first hour of the morning on your knees in Mrs Ardley's bed beside the back wall, sifting cold clay through your fingers for the copper plate you buried there in February. The frost has lifted the soil into little ridges, and the bulbs you planted for her are already showing green. Her late husband used to say the garden was the only honest thing on the street. You never agreed with him, though you have eaten his tomatoes every August since.

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Forty years of engraving for printers who went bust, and then Dorset Vane arrived with a folder of crisp notes and a figure that made your hands shake. He wanted a copy, every laurel and every curl of scrollwork, the little pyramid watching over the empty eye socket. You worked for eleven weeks at the bench by the window. You hated him the whole time, and you hated the work more, because it was perfect.

When Vane's men came for the plates in March, you handed them a different plate wrapped in oilcloth, the one you had cut as a joke, with a bold number one and HATE in capitals across the bottom. The real one went into the earth under the rhubarb, where nobody with a folder would think to dig. Vane is still waiting for a courier, and you are still waiting for the bill.

Now you lift the rhubarb aside and find the oilcloth split. The rhubarb roots have wound through the engraved laurel, and the leaves have pushed up through the scrollwork, green where the silver lines used to be. You wipe the copper with your sleeve. The pyramid's eye stares up through a tangle of stems, and you leave it there in the soil, to let the garden finish what you started.