Realism tattoo of a graveyard, crosses, skulls and bones under a red lightning sky, covering a full back.

Graveyard and skulls across a full back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A full back piece showing a graveyard of white crosses rising towards a red sky split by lightning. Two hands grip the shoulders from above, and a heap of skulls and bones fills the lower back. The shading is greyscale with soft gradients, while red is used for the sky and for touches inside the skulls.

Realism Back Graveyard Cross Skull Bone Lightning Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that lantern down, boy, and listen before Compline takes us. You will want the words right when you tell it to the next lot of novices, and they will always ask about the sky.

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The year the sickness came up the valley road, the sky over Saint Oswin's went the colour of a forge. Brother Anselm, who kept the burial ground then, said the lightning walked across it all that summer like a man looking for a door. We dug the pit below the orchard wall because the ground above was too hard. Forty-one went into that pit. Each one got a cross of ash wood, limewashed white, and the rain had stripped the paint by Michaelmas, so every spring we painted them again.

Now the part they never tell at the gate. On the last night of the dying, a carter came up the hill with a cart of bones from a collapsed charnel house in the town, and he would not stop to unload. Brother Anselm went out with a lamp and found him gripping the shafts so hard his knuckles had gone white. He was weeping and saying the dead had put their hands on his shoulders and would not let him go. Anselm lifted the lamp to the man's shoulders and found nothing there but wet cloth and the marks of his own fingers.

We buried the bones beneath the cross where the lightning struck twice. The grass grew up through them red that year, and the old men say you can still see it at dusk. Go on now. Mind the step.