Black and grey pirate skull illustration wearing a skull-print bandana, an eye patch and a hoop earring, above crossed bones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pirate skull with crossed bones

Black and grey · Flash

A realistic-style illustration of a grinning skull wearing a patterned bandana with small skulls and crossbones, an eye patch over one eye and a hoop earring. Two long bones cross beneath the skull on a dark, textured background. Shading is smooth and greyscale, with bright highlights on the bone and bandana against deep black.

Skull Crossbones Pirate Bandana Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the lot of you, and pass the bread down the table before my knees give out. You want a wedding story, so I'll give you the sea one my mother forbade at christenings. Forty years back, aboard the brig Morwenna, there sailed a quartermaster called Josiah Crane, who had one good eye and a scrap of black cloth over the other, and who swore he'd hand the rum ration to the first man who could stand upright in a gale.

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Nobody stood. Not the cook, not the boy, not the big Welshman who'd once wrestled a bear in Bristol. So Crane took the helm himself, knotted his bandana over his hair the way the sailors called the widow's bow, and steered us through three nights of black water by the stars he could see and the ones he only remembered. On the fourth morning the wind died and the sea lay flat as a plate, and there was Crane, asleep against the wheel, with a letter crumpled in his fist, addressed to a girl in Plymouth who had never once answered him.

I opened it, because I was the boy and boys open everything. It said only: "Josiah, come home and marry me, or don't, but stop shouting my name at the sea." Crane read it over twice, then laughed until the mate thought he'd lost his wits entirely.

He went home, though. He stood at her door in that bandana, with two bones he'd carved from a whale's jaw tucked under his arm, and she said yes before he could finish his speech. So raise your glasses to the bride and groom, and to the sea, which never once kept a promise but has a fine memory for a man who came back to keep his.