Pencil drawing of an apple with a leaf and stem, its surface melting into a skull face with dripping ink-like lines, shown as a tattoo design sketch on white paper.

Dripping skull apple design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of an apple with a curled stem and a single leaf, where the fruit's surface forms a skull-like face with hollow eyes, a nose and teeth. Liquid drips run down from the base of the apple and the lower edges of the face. The bold dark outline is combined with soft grey pencil shading that gives the apple and drips a rounded, shaded look, set against a plain light background.

Apple Skull Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down and keep your hands off that crate, because the apples on Mardle Quay were never for eating, not since the Tuesday the tide came in black. Old Hester Vane kept the orchard up the cliff path, and she grew the reddest fruit between here and Lundy. Her boy Tobias sold them from a barrow by the fish market, two for a penny, bawling loud enough to wake the gulls off the slipway.

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Then the rain came sideways for a month and the fruit went soft under the skin. Hester sat up nights with a candle and a paring knife, cutting out the rot, and the rot kept coming back. When she finally held one to the lamp, a bruise on its cheek had the shape of a grinning skull, and the juice ran from its jaw thick as candle wax, dripping onto her boots and pooling on the flags.

Tobias sold them anyway. Half the harbour owed him for the summer, and nobody wanted to be the one who refused a bargain. A deckhand from the Marigold bought one for his sweetheart, took a bite on the harbour wall, and laughed at the old tale about the orchard. He stopped laughing before the gulls went quiet, and by morning the whole quay was asking who had sold it to him, and Tobias had already gone up the cliff path with his empty barrow and never came down.

So if you climb to Hester's orchard and find a red fruit with a face on it, leave it hanging. Those drips on the bark are only sap, or so my grandmother told me, and she never once put her teeth to one.