A colour tattoo of a skull formed from a striped flag with stars, blue eyes and a blood-spatter edge, on the inside of a forearm.

Flag skull tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skull is formed from a flag with dark grey and black stripes, white stars on the upper left and a bold blue stripe running down the centre. The eyes and a thin blue stripe are highlighted in blue, with pale nasal and teeth details beneath. Soft red and dark spatter surrounds the skull and fades into the skin, and the photograph is taken straight on under a studio light.

Forearm Skull Flag Star Stripe Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had carried the lantern three miles before he admitted the path had changed. The beeches at the edge of Harrowcombe had always stood in a tidy row, grey trunks like a line of sentries, but tonight one gap had opened between them, and through it the trees were darker than dark.

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Maud the dyer had warned him about the gap. She had sewn the village banner herself the winter the bridge washed away, charcoal and ash stripes laid down the length of good wool, a blue thread running straight through the middle for the river that kept them alive. Above the stripes she had worked a crown of small white stars, seven of them, because seven was what the parish could count on. Hang it across the gap, she had said, and the wood would keep to its own side.

He unrolled the banner against the first beech and felt it catch the wind. The gap answered with a sound like a breath drawn through teeth, and then something stood in it: a skull of bog oak, black as pitch, its eye sockets hollowed out and filled with blue glaze that burned the way a gas flame burns in cold weather. The thin blue line of the banner flared to meet the glow.

Tomas did not run. He pinned the cloth with two nails and a fist of wet clay, stepped back, and counted the stars under his breath until the blue eyes dimmed and the gap closed like a mouth. In the morning the banner was still on the tree, faded only a little, and the seven white stars were the first thing the sun found.