Large grey ink back tattoo of an ornate skull with a seated Buddha in its centre, flanked by winged figures and a mandala above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental skull and seated Buddha across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a skull filling the lower two-thirds of the back, with a small seated Buddha figure set within its central cavity. Above, a mandala-like circular pattern sits inside an ornate pointed frame, and winged figures extend across the shoulder blades. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading that gives the skull and ornaments depth, and the ink is entirely black and grey against pale skin.

Back Skull Buddha Mandala Wing Ornament Teeth

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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

Sit closer, the fire only ever has one more log in it. You want the tale of the Widow's Gate, and you'll get it the way my grandmother gave it to me, not the way the schoolmaster tells it.

Keep reading

Up on the ridge above Harrowmere stood a castle the lords abandoned when the river changed its course. Over its inner gate was a carved skull, grinning with every tooth, its brow cut with looping ornament that wrapped the stonework like ivy. Nobody could say who had carved it. What people did say was that a small man sat cross-legged in the hollow of that grin, eyes shut, and that he was the only soul in the whole keep who ever looked content.

A mason called Tobiah Rell came up one autumn to mend the gatehouse. He was paid by the day and hated the cold. On his third evening he found the ornament over the arch had cracked clean across, and behind the crack was a hollow no bigger than a walnut, full of rolled paper. He read it by candlelight. It was a list of every man who had ever dropped a stone on the road below and not gone back to lift it. Tobiah had dropped one himself that very afternoon, a grey lump he'd kicked off his cart on the bend.

So he walked the three miles back down at first light. The stone lay where he'd left it, and beside it, pressed into the mud, was the print of a small bare foot folded under a leg. He sat down in the same shape and waited, as the little man in the gate had waited for centuries, until the carter came round the bend and cursed him for blocking the way. That is the whole of it. The gate is still standing, and if you climb up on a clear night you may see the little man's eyes open. Mind the road going home.