Black and grey photograph of a blackwork ornamental skull tattoo on the upper thigh, with the face cropped out of frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental skull on the upper thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black skull tattoo on the outer upper thigh is filled with dense geometric patterns, including bands, diamonds and rounded motifs. The linework is bold and the shading is mostly solid black ink with fine detail in the pattern. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's torso and face cropped out and a plain light wall behind the leg.

Blackwork Geometric Thigh Skull Ornament Pattern

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

Tamsin, the loom-clerk finally signed the requisition, so the stamping die for the skull is ours to keep, though Mother's rule still stands: nothing leaves the Reach without its lattice filled. I sat up with the old plate last night under the lamp that hums like a bad fridge, tracing the bands with a stylus. Every diamond is a ward, Gran used to say, and every rounded knot is a door that only opens one way.

Keep reading

The skull itself is the hard part. Nobody draws faces any more, because the faces were all sold to the Orrery years ago. So the cutters work from the jaw upwards, bands of hatching across the brow, then the eye sockets packed so tight with lozenges that they go solid black from three metres off. Pell says that is the whole trick: from far away it is a death's head, and up close it is a kitchen full of small useful shapes.

Yesterday the Orrery sent a man up to check the die. He turned the plate over twice, then asked who had cut the jaw. I said my own hand, and he nodded as if I had handed him a receipt. He will take forty of them to the outer ring on the next tug. I told him the skull is only a counting mark for the dead, nothing more, and he smiled and said that was what everyone says about a ward.

I have kept one back for you. It is under the bunk, wrapped in your old school jumper, pattern side up so the lattice catches the light from the vent. Come home when the tug docks. Bring the stylus. We will finish the last diamond together, the one Gran never got to.