Colour realism tattoo of a skull wrapped in orange and yellow flames on a forearm, shown in two side by side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flaming skull on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A skull wrapped in flames covers the forearm, with its eye sockets and jaw shaded in deep black. Smooth shading and bright orange, yellow and red flame edges give the design a glowing, three dimensional look. The two photographs show the same arm from slightly different angles, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Skull Flame Fire

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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

Shift nearer, the lot of you, before the wind off the mudflats takes my voice away. You want the tale of the Fire Skull of Harrow Green? Then mind the brazier and don't prod it with your sticks, because that is how the trouble began.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Quill ran the Midsummer Fair the year the bell foundry shut. He kept a fire-eater called Nell Marchbank, who could hold a flaming torch in her teeth until the crowd fell silent, and a juggler's skull of hammered copper she carried in a leather bag. Each night she splashed paraffin on it and set it alight on the swing-boat rail, and the flames curled over its brow like a bonnet of sparks. Children standing in the mud swore the eyes blinked.

Then came the wet August. The rain filled the ground until the big wheel sank a foot, and Nell's hands began to shake before she lit her torch. One night Quill found her sat in the lee of the generator, staring into the black sockets of the thing. She told him it was hungry. He laughed, until he saw that the copper had gone the colour of old coal inside those holes, though she had never once let the paraffin run down its jaw.

She threw it in the river at dawn. Quill swore he heard it hiss under the water. The next morning it sat on the caravan step, bone dry, its flames burning as steady as a lamp in a window, and Nell was never seen at the fair again. Some say she went looking for the river that gave it back. The step is still warm, if you lay your palm on it.