Traditional-style tattoo of the goddess Kali with a third eye and protruding tongue, wearing a skull necklace, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kali goddess with skull necklace on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A traditional-style portrait of the goddess Kali, with a dark blue-black face, a third eye on the forehead, orange eyes and a protruding red tongue, framed by an ornate headdress and a necklace of skulls. Bold black outlines define the linework, with solid fills and grey shading. Red, yellow-orange and grey ink dominate against a dark background, and the design fills the frame of the limb.

Traditional Upper arm Third eye Tongue Skull Headdress

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

Dessa Okonedo had been told the reclamation tug was empty, which was why she took the berth. Nobody lived aboard the Hollin Reach after the cull, only the drones that kept its scrubbers humming and the thing bolted above the airlock: a face the colour of a bruise, three eyes open on the dark, a red tongue hanging out as if it had just tasted the crew.

Keep reading

The others called it Mother Sabre, though none of them could say why. Dessa found the answer in the scrap ledger, where the tug's sanction code carried a skull glyph beside it. Each night the drones ran a count of the ring's dead, and each night a pale bead appeared on the necklace of skulls across the figure's chest that nobody had put there.

She climbed up with a torch and a stolen cutter, meaning to strip the brass for the markets on Pell. The tongue was enamel, cold as a fired kiln. When she touched the forehead eye, the lights along the ring dimmed in order, sector by sector, the way a congregation falls quiet when the door opens.

She didn't take the brass. She wrote the ring's name on the airlock plate in grease pencil, the way her grandmother had marked names on lifeboat doors, and she let the tug drift toward the sun with its sentry still watching. The count, she decided, could wait for someone with more nerve.