Colour tattoo of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas on the inner forearm, with a purple head, black bow tie and blue swirling background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jack Skellington on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows Jack Skellington's purple head with a wide stitched grin, black eye sockets and a small black bow tie with pinstriped-style shading below it. Smooth blended shading gives the skull volume, and bold black outlines define the features. Blue wisps curl behind the head and down the arm, and the image is framed tightly on the forearm.

Neo-trad Forearm Jack skellington Skull Bow tie Swirl

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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 open the cold store at five in the morning expecting haddock and find a purple face looking back at you from the top shelf, grinning through a row of stitches. It is not a head the trawler's crew would have shipped. Its eye sockets are black and its bow tie sits neatly under its chin, as if someone dressed it for a wedding and then forgot the wedding.

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"Morning," it says, in the voice of a man who has read too many library books about the sea. "I am looking for the nearest ship bound for a place where nobody has heard of Halloween."

You tell it the nearest ship is this one, that the next port is Hull, and that nobody in Hull has heard of anything before breakfast. It seems pleased. It asks whether the galley has a pan large enough for a sleigh-shaped experiment, and you hand it the big stockpot, because arguing with a skull at five in the morning is a losing game.

By Tuesday the stockpot has produced three batches of something green that glows, the bosun has stopped complaining about the smell, and the skipper is convinced the catch is coming up in better shape. The skull sits on the chopping board between you and the potatoes, humming a tune with no tune in it, and when a squall hits and the galley lurches, the bow tie is the only thing still straight.

On the last night of the trip you wrap the best of the haddock in brown paper and tie it with string, the way your mother used to. The skull takes one look and laughs so hard the blue sea-light flickers behind it. "Now that," it says, "is a present."