Ink and grey wash drawing of a skull melting into drips with wisps of smoke above, shown as a tattoo design without any body placement.

Dripping skull with smoke design

Black and grey · Flash

A skull with heavy, melting forms running down from its jaw and eye sockets, ending in a long tapered point at the base. Smoke or cloud shapes rise behind the top of the skull and small bubbles float around the drips. The bold black outlines are combined with soft grey pencil shading on the skull, and the design is centred on a plain cream background.

Skull Smoke Drip Bubble Spike

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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

The band has stopped halfway through a foxtrot, and you are still holding the cigarette Marguerite pressed into your fingers, watching the ash grow long because nobody has moved to take it. Smoke from the stage lamps hangs under the ceiling in grey, curling banks, like the wash of an old engraving. Beneath it the wax from the chandeliers has been running for hours, sliding down the brass in slow tongues and pooling on the parquet where the dancers keep stepping through it.

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Harold comes across the floor with his hat crushed in both hands. He owns the Palais and owes money to half of Margate, and he tells you the tallyman's car was seen on the pier road. He says the skull above the bar, the one gilded for the Coronation dance, has started to drip, and he wants it down before the customers notice. You tell him it's only lacquer softening in the heat. He doesn't believe you, and you don't believe yourself.

You climb the ladder behind the bar. The skull is cold and heavier than plaster has any right to be, and when you tilt it toward the lamp the gold has slid from the cheekbones in glossy runnels that taper to a point, a long spike of it dripping onto your cuff. A bubble swells at the tip and breaks with a sound like a cork. Under the gilt the bone is grey and bare, and the empty sockets are looking at you the way the tallyman looks at a ledger.

When you carry it down, the smoke above the room has gathered into a cloud the shape of a crown and it is sinking slowly onto the dancers. Nobody stops. Marguerite laughs at something her partner says, and the wax takes the print of their shoes and holds it. By morning the floor will be the colour of candle grease, and you will be the one on your knees with a scraper, lifting cold drops from the boards one at a time.