Black and grey tattoo of a snarling skull with clawed, shadowy flames around it, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned skull with claws and shading

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A grinning skull with hollow eye sockets and pointed fangs sits at the centre, with long clawed shapes and smoky shadows spreading out around it. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft grey shading across the bone and background to give depth. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the canopies since nine, and by four the Saturday market at Mill Street was a river of cardboard and bruised pears. I was packing up my pitch of secondhand brass when a man in a grey mackintosh stopped at the trestle and asked whether I had anything with teeth.

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I sell buttons, hymnbooks and the odd tin of cocoa, so I told him no. He laughed, water running off his nose, and nodded at the shrouded box I'd been meaning to shift since Tuesday. Inside was a skull cast in dull pewter, horns curling back like a ram's, jaw hinged open in a grin that showed every tooth. Soot had settled round the eye holes and stayed there, even with the damp. I'd bought it from a widow's clearance in Bolton for two pounds, and in eleven years nobody had taken it home, because every browser said it watched them.

The man didn't flinch. He counted out coins from a purse that looked older than the skull and asked me to lift it for him. When my fingers closed on the horns, the drumming on the tarpaulin stopped all at once. Thin grey shapes slid off the canopy edges and reached down the stalls like clawed fingers, pooling in the puddles without a single ripple. The skull's grin widened by the width of a thumb.

The council men found my pitch at dusk, the tarpaulin dry as paper and the trestle bare except for a ring of soot. The man in the mackintosh had gone, and so, I'm told, had the rain.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.