Neo-traditional style tattoo of a melting skull with red eyes and nasal cavity on the forearm, set against a grey and red smoky wash.

Melting skull with red eyes on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A cracked, partly melted skull fills the forearm, with red shading inside the eye sockets and nasal cavity and drips of grey running down the lower half. The linework is dark and loose, and grey wash shading creates soft smoky edges that fade into patches of red at the top. The image is a close, straight-on photograph with the skin tone and the pale pavement behind the arm visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Forearm Skull Smoke Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down before the sherry goes warm, the lot of you. Some of you won't remember the old pottery shed at Ferris Hollow, but I do, because I was the one who found the thing in the sluice the summer the reservoir dried out. A bleached sheep's skull, Mr Abney said, though nobody believed him, and he was never a man who lied about bones.

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The cracks ran through it like a map of the Fens. Someone had left it out in the sun too long, or the rain had got into the eye holes and softened the bone, so it went grey and ran down its own jaw as if a tide had come in and gone out again inside it. We kept it on the windowsill of the science lab. At break we'd hold a torch behind it and watch the light leak through the sockets, and by Friday the room smelled of wet chalk and burnt matches.

Then came the bonfire night the sixth form tried to set fire to the caretaker's shed. Smoke rolled across the playing fields in a black fist. Jennifer Pike swore that through it she saw two red coals lit behind the glass, and she ran straight into the smoke to fetch it. She came back coughing, soot in her hair, the skull held against her chest like a baby, and she set it down on the bench and said, "It wants to go home."

Nobody asked her where home was. I went back to the reservoir last spring, and the mud had cracked white in exactly that pattern. Something had melted there a long time ago, and the water had kept the shape of it. The bench is gone now, and the lab too, but I still think of her standing in that smoke, waiting for the red to come back into the eyes.