Monochrome lettering design shaped as a skull, reading Beautiful Disaster and Sinner Saint, shown as a flash-style artwork with no body placement.

Lettering skull design in white on black

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A skull outline formed from white lettering on a solid black background, with Beautiful Disaster across the top and Sinner Saint along the lower jaw. Smaller phrases including Perfectly Imperfect, Love, Hate, Live Fast and Die Pretty fill the eye sockets and central area. The lettering is solid white with no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Lettering Skull Lettering Love

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

The paint is still tacky when the purser knocks, so you tell him to wait outside the saloon door. Six weeks out of Valparaíso and the Ceres has been rolling since the Horn, and every board you have lettered has slid a little sideways in the wet. You have one brush worth keeping, a pot of lamp black and a pot of lead white, and a skull still to finish before the captain comes down to see what the second mate's memorial is going to look like.

Keep reading

He had wanted words, not a portrait, so you sat with him in the lamp room while he talked. The mate had said things over the galley table that nobody else would repeat: that he loved the sea the way a man loves a bad wife, that his luck was a beautiful disaster, that he'd rather live fast and die pretty than grow old on a Liverpool pier. You wrote them on the back of a chart. Love and hate went where the eyes should be, and the captain laughed, then went quiet, when you set Perfectly Imperfect across the bridge of the nose.

By the fourth evening the jaw was taking shape, Sinner Saint curving under the teeth in letters that grew smaller towards the corners of the mouth. The ship groaned and the lamp swung, and the white lead ran in a bead down the S of Disaster, so you had to lift it with the end of a rag and start the stroke again. Nobody else aboard had been asked to make something out of the mate's last talk, and you found you were careful with every letter.

When the captain finally came down, he didn't speak for a long while. Then he asked you to sign it. You painted your initial under the jaw, small as a rivet, and left the board to the lamplight and the sea air, which would take the wet shine off the black long before the anchor came up at Liverpool.