Black and grey poison bottle tattoo with a stippled skull and crossbones on a forearm, with a partial bird and rose at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poison bottle with skull and crossbones

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall poison bottle with a stopper and banded neck is filled with a stippled skull and crossbones, with the skull outlined in bold black. The bottle has a solid black outline and dotted shading that fades to light grey behind the skull. Partial black bird and red rose tattoos sit at the left edge of the frame against a brick wall backdrop.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Bottle Skull Crossbones Bird Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the night shift at St Aldric's would touch the old cabinet in the dispensary store. Mrs Pell, who had kept the pharmacy keys for thirty-one years, said the bottles inside had been emptied in 1952 and rinsed three times, but she still wouldn't let the porters carry the crate past the lift. Her grandmother had told her why. A poison that is finished with, she said, keeps a little of what it was for.

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Dennis came on at ten, the winter the wards went short of nurses, and he laughed at the story until the Tuesday the power dipped and the store went dark. He carried a torch down the corridor and heard the glass chiming behind the cabinet doors, one tone after another, like a wet finger run round the rims of teacups. When he shone the beam through the wire mesh, a single tall bottle sat on the top shelf with its stopper loosened and a skull inside it, grinning out of the dark liquid as if it had been waiting to be asked.

He did what the old tale said to do. He carried the bottle down to the boiler room, where the heat was steady, and he tipped the grey dust of it into the furnace while he read every label on every shelf aloud, so that none of the names would be forgotten. The chiming stopped. Somewhere above him the lights came back on.

In the morning the bottle sat empty and clean on the bench, and the skull on its side was no more than a faint smudge where the ink had dried. Mrs Pell took it from him without a word and put it back in the crate, and that was the last anyone spoke of the dispensary's dead stock.