Black and grey ornamental skull face tattoo covering a person's full back, with rows of small skulls above and filigree scrollwork around the eyes.

Ornamental skull face across a full back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A full back tattoo shows a large ornamental skull face with wide round eyes, a flame-like crest and a central headpiece. Rows of small skulls run across the top of the back, framed by scrollwork and swirling filigree. The shading is black and grey, with strong contrast and fine detail in the ornaments.

Back Skull Face Eye Filigree Scrollwork Flame Ornament Headpiece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had found the windfalls before Ada did, so she worked the rows with a bucket on one hip and a switch in her free hand, batting them off the bruised Conference pears as the late August sun pressed down on the Herefordshire grass. At the foot of the old bramley, half sunk in nettles, lay the cider press lid her father had carved the winter before he died. She had not looked at it since the funeral. Lichen had crept over the scrollwork, and the flames he had cut above the brow were furred with green.

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She knelt and brushed it clean with her sleeve. The face stared up at her, broad and grave, its two round eyes bored out and blackened with pitch so that they caught the light like wet stones. Along the top ran a row of tiny skulls, each no bigger than a thumbnail, and he had always said they were the apples that never got picked, counting themselves into the wood. Tom had wanted it sold to the man from Ledbury who bought old farm things. Ada had said no, and then had said nothing for a year.

She lifted the lid onto the bucket and set it down among the fruit. Within a minute the wasps had found the sugar in the split pears and crawled up over the carved rim, settling into the hollows of the eyes as if they had been waiting there all along. Ada watched them drone and blink in the pitch, fat and slow with the sweetness. She left the switch lying in the grass and sat down beside the bucket to wait for the shade to reach them.