Colour tattoo of a green-hatted skull with yellow shamrocks and a black hat band, on the upper arm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green top hat skull with shamrocks on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A skull wears a tall green top hat with a gold-yellow shamrock on its brim and a black band with a gold buckle. Two more shamrocks sit on the skull's cheek and near the eye socket, and the teeth are outlined in black. The bold black outlines and flat green, yellow and gold fills are shown against a dark background on an upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Top hat Shamrock Clover

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stile, and keep your hand out of the blackberry, for the wood at the edge of Cullen Ash does not forgive a grabbing hand. Now. You want the tale of Old Tobin Gale, who stitched hats for the lords of Kilbrack and never once in his life paid for a shamrock.

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Tobin sat by the bog road with a green wool crown across his knee, working gold thread into the brim, and each dawn the mist came up white off the mire and he sang to it so it would keep to the ditches. The lords paid in coin. The little folk paid in luck, which Tobin found worth less than he'd hoped, since a man cannot buy bread with it. So one winter he climbed the hill to the thorn where they gather, and he found the eldest of them sitting on a root with a black leather band and a gold buckle, weeping over a lost wager with a heron.

Tobin mended the band. The eldest was so pleased he gave him a sprig of clover for every stitch, and Tobin, being a practical man, sewed each one onto the brim where the rain could not wash it off. Then the old fellow died in the hard frost, as their kind do when they forget to eat, and the wood folk left him under the thorn in the hat Tobin had made. Spring came. Tobin went up to look, and found only the bones, the hat, and the clover, all grinning at the sky.

Go up there on Saint Patrick's morning and you'll see it still. The buckle's gone dull, a wren has built in the crown, and the shamrocks on that yellowed skull are greener than anything in the lords' parlours. Tobin never got his bread. But the hat still fits.