Flash-style drawing of a flaming skull wearing a vest top above a banner reading LOOKS LIKE SHIT, in red and navy line work with a small star below.

Flaming skull in a tank top with banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A line drawing of a skull with red flames rising from the crown, wearing a sleeveless top with a cross mark on the shoulder. The skull has red-filled eye sockets, and the figure sits above a curved banner with the words LOOKS LIKE SHIT in red capitals. The bold navy outlines, flat red fills and small star on a cream background give it a traditional flash sheet look.

Traditional Skull Flame Banner Star Lettering Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Oda had painted banners for the Kingdom of Varra for thirty years and had never once been asked to write a true thing. So when the Chancellor's clerk unrolled a strip of vellum and demanded a motto for the new river bridge, she dipped her brush in red ink and wrote the words she had been saving since the spring floods took her husband's mill.

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The bridge was a grey, sulky thing that nobody wanted. Its keystone bore a carved skull the masons had pulled from the riverbed, and someone, probably a drunk mason called Pell, had pressed two ember-coloured glass beads into its eye sockets, so that at dusk the arch seemed to smoulder. The townsfolk crossed it with their heads down, muttering about taxes, and Oda thought the skull looked as tired as they did.

On the opening day the Chancellor stood on the bridge in his velvet and read the banner aloud, frowning over the old script. He stumbled on the last word, then tried again, and the crowd fell silent, unsure whether they were being insulted or blessed. A miller's boy began to laugh. Then a washerwoman joined him, and then the whole of the bank was roaring, slapping their knees, pointing at the carved skull with its burning brow.

The Chancellor never learned what the words meant. Oda never told him. But that evening the people of Varra crossed the bridge with their chins up, and the glass embers in the skull's eyes flared bright as the last of the sun went down.