Two matching colour tattoos of Jack Skellington and Sally in ornate black oval frames, shown side by side on upper arms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jack and Sally framed portraits on upper arms

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two cartoon-style portraits sit inside ornate black scrollwork frames, one showing Jack Skellington with a dark blue starry background and the other showing Sally with a red hood and green-tinted background. The linework is bold and black, with soft shading on the faces and simple stitch details, and the two pieces are placed side by side so they read as a pair.

Upper arm Jack skellington Sally Ornate frame Stitches Portrait Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire's nearly out and I'll not shout over the trams. You want to hear about the frames? Every old frame-maker in Leeds knows the pair that hung in Mother Ashdown's back window on Kirkgate, and I'll tell it the way she told it to me, having had it from her father, who had it from the gilder himself.

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He was a gilder with more debts than sense, and one wet night in October a woman knocked on his workshop door with two oval boards under her arm. Painted on them were a tall fellow with a grin like a carved pumpkin, and a girl with a red shawl and eyes that never quite settled. Both had stitches drawn round their faces, neat as a seamstress's hem. "They were cut from the same bolt of moonlight," she said, "and they're not allowed to meet until the frames are finished. Make them a border that holds them apart but lets them look." So he worked three weeks on the scrollwork, black as a funeral hat, curling it round the edges until the two could see each other only across a little dark gap.

On the first hard frost the gilder came in to find the frames moved. They sat side by side on his bench, and the shading on the boards had gone soft at the edges, as if somebody had been holding hands in there all night. One stitch on each cheek had been picked free, and a thread of red wool hung from the scroll like a bookmark.

Mother Ashdown hung them in her window that same week and never sold them. Walk past on a clear night and you'll see the blue sky behind the tall one and the green behind the girl, and you'll see those stitches loosened, just a touch, as if the two of them are still working at it.