Black and grey realistic skull tattoo with smoky wisps across the top of a foot, running from the ankle towards the toes, in a Realism style.

Realistic skull and smoke on the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A greyscale skull is tattooed across the top of a foot, with its eye socket and jaw sitting over the toes and wisps of smoke-like linework curling up towards the ankle. The skull is shaded with soft gradients and sharp highlights, with bold black outlines on the smoke. The image is a close, straight-on photograph against a light, reflective surface, and the toenails are painted black and red.

Realism Other Skull Smoke Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tam Riddell had kept the skull on the windowsill of the Gull Rock cottage for thirty years, and nobody on Skerray would say whose it had been. Every October the peat smoke came in low off the bog and sat in the kitchen like a tenant, and Tam would sit with his boots to the range and talk to the skull as if it were a neighbour who owed him rent.

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The summer the ferry stopped, a girl from the mainland came over with a surveyor's chain and a notebook. Her name was Ingrid Sorley and she wanted the cottage for a bird station. She noticed the skull first, then the way the smoke from the chimney bent away from it. "It doesn't burn right in here," she said. Tam laughed and told her the bones had a habit of drawing it.

She stayed through the wet weeks, measuring the cliffs, and each night she found a little more of the story in the tin trunk under his bed: letters from a wrecker's widow, a bill of sale for a cask of Spanish brandy, and a map with the eye socket marked in red ink where the old lantern used to hang. When pressed, Tam only said the skull had belonged to the man who lit false lights on the rocks, and that he had come to a bad end in his own fire.

On the last night of her survey the smoke came back. Ingrid watched it lift from the hearth, pause over the windowsill, and drift out through the crack in the glass as if somebody had opened a door. In the morning Tam was gone, the peat was still warm, and on the sill the skull sat with its jaw turned towards the sea, as though it had finally been asked the way home.