Black and grey Traditional style tattoo of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas inside an ornate oval frame, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jack Skellington in an ornate frame on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows Jack Skellington peering out from an oval frame with a spiderweb behind him, set within a scrolled and foliate ornamental border topped with a fleur-like finial. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth grey shading on the face, the bony fingers and the striped collar. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred on the calf, filling most of the frame of the photograph.

Traditional Calf Jack skellington Spiderweb Ornate frame Oval frame Scrollwork Character

Find an artist for this

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

Keep your hands off the lock beam, Tommy, and sit where the lamp can reach you. No, nearer. The Lydia had been moored at Hollin Lock three nights when the boy found the frame in the bilge hatch, wrapped in oilcloth and a wedding veil gone the colour of weak tea. Oval, it was, gilt scrolls flaking off like dead leaves, and a little bone-white gentleman peering out from behind a spider's web as if he'd been waiting years for someone to lift the cloth.

Keep reading

Tommy's dad said it was rubbish and hung it over the stove. Every night the gentleman moved a finger. Every morning the web was a bit thicker, and the stripes on his collar had shifted a notch to the left. Tommy counted them in pencil on the cabin wall. Nine notches by Bonfire Night. His mum said nobody could carry a frame that heavy in their sleep, then she was gone to her sister's with the good kettle and the dog.

On the last night of October the cabin went cold and the lamp guttered down to a blue bead. The little man was out of the glass, sitting on the sill with his long fingers folded, straightening the webs in the window as neat as a clerk. He had a voice like a dropped spoon. He asked Tommy, very politely, whether the dog had a name, and Tommy, who had never once been asked a polite question by anything in a frame, said Bramble. The gentleman wrote it on his own cuff with a sliver of bone.

Next morning the frame hung empty on its nail, the web was cut clean, and there was a small grey pawprint on the glass that nobody on the Lydia could explain. The good ones always leave a mark, my nan used to say, so you know you were honest with them. Now drink your cocoa and mind the gap at the lock.