Black and grey pencil drawing of a flaming skull with a large eye in its forehead and a toothy grin, a tattoo flash design.

Flaming skull with eye tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a skull wreathed in tall, curling flames, with a single detailed eye set above the brow and a wide, toothy grin below. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft graphite shading on the flames and the skull's cheekbones to create depth. The design is in greyscale on a plain white background, with the flames extending the full height of the image.

Skull Flame Eye Teeth

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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

Get under the awning, the lot of you, before the rain takes the paint off my good sign. Mind the puddle by the fish crates. Mrs Pargeter's stall is still standing, which is more than the pie van managed. Now, do you want to hear about the skull, or would you rather stand there dripping and pretending you're not interested?

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Old Ansel Greave kept a brass lamp shaped like a skull, with flames curling up from its crown like hair and one eye of cut glass set above the brow. He sold it every Saturday for thirty years and never once on a wet day, because the flames wouldn't stand up in the rain. The eye, they said, watched whoever carried it. It never blinked, and on dry days it seemed to grin a little wider at the people who haggled.

A lad called Tom Mabry bet Ansel a shilling that he could carry the lamp from one end of the market to the other in a downpour without a single flame going out. Ansel laughed and took the coin. Tom ran with his cupped hands round the brass, water hissing off the lot of it, his boots slapping through the gutters. Halfway across, the flames guttered down to nothing, and the boy swore the glass eye was looking straight at him. Then the flames stood up tall again, as bright as a struck match, and Tom reached the stall with his teeth chattering and the grin all lit up.

Ansel always said the wick had never been lit by anything but nerve. He's gone now, God rest him, and the lamp's on the shelf behind me. Tom Mabry sold it to me for a shilling, and I've never once carried it in the rain. Who fancies a pie? Mrs Pargeter's are the only ones left, and she's sold the last of the good gravy.