Traditional colour tattoo of a pirate skull with a green bandana, eyepatch and crossed cutlasses on a calf, framed by red flowers and grey clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pirate skull with cutlasses on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A pirate skull wears a green bandana and a brown eyepatch decorated with a small flower, with two crossed cutlasses behind it. Red flowers with yellow centres and grey clouds surround the skull, and the words Never Say Die sit in lettering above. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, green, yellow and brown give a classic traditional look, photographed on a lower leg against a dark textured background.

Traditional Calf Pirate Skull Flower Bandana Cloud Banner

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 gulls had given up on the Mary Ann by the time Tobias Greave hauled the last crate onto the quay at Pennick Cove. Old Hesketh was already on the bench outside the Anchor, one hand on his cane and the other on a pint he had not touched. He watched the boy wipe his palms on his trousers and asked him, without looking up, whether he had heard about the Carrow sisters.

Keep reading

Tobias had heard. Everyone in Pennick had heard. The sisters had sold their father's chandlery and bought a brass-bound chest from a Bristol auctioneer, and the chest had come back to the cove in a fog with two cutlasses lying across the lid and a note saying the man who opened it would not see the spring tide. Nobody had opened it. Tobias said as much, and Hesketh laughed until he coughed.

"Never say die, that's what the sisters wrote on their door," the old man said. "Their father's motto. He sailed under it with a green rag round his head and one eye gone to a Spanish musket. Never once said it to a living soul, mind. Only painted it over his bunk."

Tobias sat down beside him. Out past the breakwater the cloud bank was rolling in grey and low, the colour of old pewter, and under it the water had turned a strange bright green.

"So open the chest," he said.

Hesketh finally lifted his pint and drank, slowly, the way a man does when he has decided something. "Already did," he said. "Yesterday. It was full of flowers."