Bold black and red tattoo of a skull with a gunman in silhouette, set against a red flame outline, on a person's calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Punisher skull and gunman on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large skull in solid black with white highlights, with a figure in black silhouette holding a gun across the upper half. A red flame-like outline surrounds the design and sets it against the skin. The linework is heavy and graphic, with flat black fills and little visible shading, and the image is framed to show the whole design on the lower leg.

Calf Skull Gun Flame

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 stencil had been cut from a cereal box and the sleeve of an old X-ray, and Dessie Marr was still scraping red oxide off his knife when the van pulled up outside the chip shop. Two men got out. Neither of them looked at the shutter, which was how Dessie knew they had already seen it.

Keep reading

The skull was the third one that month. Each time it appeared on a shutter, a bin lorry or the side of a bus shelter, the same black grin with its white bars of teeth stared down Harbour Street until the council painted over it. Dessie had never meant it as a warning. He had meant it as a joke for the boys at the boatyard, a skull with a gunman rising behind it like smoke off a fire. But jokes travel fast in a town this small, and by Tuesday the gunman had become a rumour with a name.

The men came back on Wednesday with a bucket and asked nicely for the lot to be taken down. Dessie told them the paint was his and the wall belonged to the council, which had been glad of the free work. One of them picked up the knife left on the bench and turned it over in his hand, then set it down exactly where it had been. It was the most frightening thing anyone had done in Harbour Street all year.

On Thursday the shutter was clean. Someone had scrubbed it with turps overnight, and the grey wood was lightening under the drizzle. Dessie stood in the road and watched for a while, then went back to his bench, cut a fresh sheet of card, and started the gunman again. This time he faced the harbour with his back to the road, and the barrel pointed at the lane the van had come in by.