Black ink pen drawing of a realistic human skull seen from the front, built from cross-hatched shading on a dark background.

Pen and ink skull drawing

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A front-on human skull fills the frame, with empty eye sockets, a shadowed nasal cavity and upper and lower teeth clearly shown. The skull is rendered in fine pen linework and dense cross-hatching, with shadow pooling around the cheekbones and eye sockets. The image is almost entirely black and white, set against a dark background that makes the bone stand out.

Realism Skull Teeth Bone

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 cooper of Veld Hollow had a habit of counting things while he talked, so when his daughter Ilse came home from the river without the bucket, he counted her fingers first, then her teeth, and only then asked where the bucket was. She said the water had taken it, and he believed her, because the river took something from Veld Hollow every spring and gave back a little less each year.

Keep reading

That autumn the old king sent heralds through the valley to say that the bridge at Carrow would be rebuilt in stone, and that every household must give one bone to mortar the piers. The cooper laughed at this until the heralds came to his door with a sack and a pair of iron tongs. He had nothing to give but the skull of his dead wife's mule, which he had kept in the loft for twelve years because it had a fine set of teeth. The herald turned it over in his hands and said it would do, though the eye holes were too big for mortar.

Ilse took the skull from the sack when the men had gone. She carried it down to the river at dusk and held it up so the last light went through the empty sockets and laid two pale coins on the water. Then she dropped it in, and the current carried it off toward Carrow, grinning and empty, and she did not go back for the bucket.