A man in grey underwear wearing a wristwatch shows a black and grey sleeve of skulls and roses on his forearm, with a larger dark design on his thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Forearm sleeve and thigh piece in grey

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo is cropped to the torso, arm and upper leg of a man in grey underwear, with the face not shown. The forearm carries a dense sleeve of black and grey tattoos, including skulls, roses and smaller stars, with shaded and outlined forms. The larger piece on the thigh is in black and grey, with dark shading and sweeping forms, and the background is a plain warm grey.

Forearm Chest Thigh Skull Rose Star Sleeve Watch Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mam, the fair pulled out of Saltcombe on Tuesday with the big wheel still lit against the rain, and I have your letter about Uncle Ted's Sunday dinner, which I will not be repeating to anyone. You will want to hear about the painting instead. Mr Harrow finally let me work on the booth canvas, the one with the skull and the rose that the council men keep asking after. The paint tins were short that week, so I did the whole thing in greys. He stood behind me with his pipe going out and said that black ink is for funerals and grey is for things that have been through weather, and I have been thinking about that ever since.

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The sea serpent was the hard part. It had to coil down the board from the top corner and loop round the rose without ever touching it, and every time I got the shading wrong it looked like a rope someone had dropped. Mr Harrow made me do it four times on newspaper before he would let me near the good board. On the fourth go I stopped fighting the curve and let the brush just follow where the wet paint wanted to run. He looked at it for a long while and then went off to the back of the wagon without saying anything, which from him is high praise.

When I came to the stars he handed me the little tin of white with the cracked lid, the one he has had since before the war, and told me the last star was mine to place. I put it in the gap above the skull where the eye sockets are, a tiny thing no bigger than a lentil. He says the stars are for the lamp on the promenade so the boats can find their way in on a bad night.

I am sending you a postcard of the finished booth so you can see it for yourself. Don't show Uncle Ted. Your loving daughter, Ruth.