Full back tattoo of a multi-armed goddess wearing a skull garland, set against a red sun disc, with a lotus on the shoulder and a blue sleeve on the arm, in Japanese and neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Goddess with skulls full back tattoo

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A man's back is covered by a large colour tattoo of a crowned goddess with a red halo, a garland of skulls and beads, and a red tongue shown at the mouth. A blue lotus and sleeve work sit on the shoulder and arm, and a large skull with flames sits near the lower left of the back. Bold outlines, smooth shading and saturated red, blue, yellow and green ink fill the composition edge to edge.

Japanese Neo-trad Back Upper arm Skull Lotus Halo Bead Flame Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the ladder before the grey has lifted off the field, the last of the Carrow and Sons tent sagging around its poles like wet laundry. Mr Pell says the banner must be finished by Saturday, when the council man comes to measure for the scrap. He has given you the old canvas, a pot of red ochre gone thick as custard, and a tin of lamp black that smells of paraffin. Nobody has asked what goddess you are meant to paint. Everyone knows she is the one who eats the time.

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You begin with the halo, because the halo is easy. You sweep it wide in one long pull, the way your mother taught you to lay a wash on a window frame, and the canvas drinks it. Then the crown, then the face, which takes the whole of Tuesday. The tongue is the hard part. Pell wants it out, red and mocking, the way the old strongman used to stick his out at the children in the front row before he lifted the pony. You give her a garland of skulls instead, forty of them, each one cut from a stencil made from the bones of the lion act that was sold to a zoo in Bristol.

By Friday the paint has run out twice. You mix the last of the blue from the knife-thrower's leftover sign and use it for a lotus in the bottom corner, because a lotus is what you paint where the rain gets in.低 at the base you paint a skull wreathed in fire, and you do not ask yourself why it looks so content.

On Saturday the council man stands in the mud with his clipboard and squints up at the banner. He says it is a fine piece of work, too fine for scrap. He says it will hang over the scrapyard gate until the rain takes it. You tell him she has eaten enough time for one season, and he laughs, and then he does not.