Black and grey forearm tattoo of a half-shaded realistic skull, with the other half breaking into fanning geometric triangle linework on the forearm.

Half skull dissolving into geometric linework

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic human skull is shown in profile on the right half of the design, with fine hatching and soft grey shading on the bone and dark shading in the eye and nasal areas. The left side breaks apart into rows of outlined triangles, arrow-like chevrons and small cross marks that fan outwards across the skin. The design is entirely black and grey, shown on a forearm against a dark background.

Realism Geometric Forearm Skull Triangle Chevron Linework

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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

You have the lift cage open at the eleventh floor and one hand on the emergency switch when the stairwell door bangs somewhere below and a woman's voice starts up the concrete, asking if you are the man from the council or the man from the lift company, because she was promised both and has been given neither. You tell her you are the lift company, which is nearly true, and she tells you the lift has been wheezing since March and she has the drawings you will want to see.

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Her flat is on the north face, and the drawings are rolled in a fishing-tackle tube under the settee. Mr Adeyemi was a draughtsman at the council before the block was clad, and he kept the original elevations annotated in biro, in a neat hand that stops, halfway down, becoming a scribble. On the north elevation someone has drawn a half skull over the balconies. The left half is all triangles, chevrons and small crosses, rows of them spreading out from the stair core like a fan, and the right half is the bone itself, hatched and careful, with the eye socket shaded in so hard the pen has torn the paper.

You spend an hour matching the chevrons to the bolt heads on the balconies, and by the time you have it, the cross marks line up with the handrails and the fan lines up with the way the cladding was laid. The thing you were hunting for in the lift shaft, the cable that keeps sliding off its pulley, turns out to run along the line of the skull's jaw. Mrs Adeyemi watches from the doorway. She says her husband used to claim the block was built to be read from the ring road, and that the skull faces the motorway so nobody has to be looked at directly.

You fold the drawing back into its tube and ride the lift down with her to the ground floor, the doors grinding open onto the car park, where the sodium light makes everyone look as though they have been drawn in grey.