Pencil drawing of a human skull seen from the front, with fine hatched shading on white paper, as a tattoo design sketch.

Realistic skull drawing in pencil

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing human skull is drawn in pencil on a plain white background, with the cranium, eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth all shown. Fine hatched linework builds up soft shading on the skull's upper surface and deeper tone in the sockets and jaw. The image is in black and grey only and the skull sits centred with generous empty space around it.

Realism Skull

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 showman kept the skull in a tin box lined with red baize, and he would not let anyone touch it but the girl who sold the tickets. Her name was Nell Ardle and she was nine years old, and when the fair pitched on the common above Hexham that August, she was the one who carried it out each evening and set it on the card table beside the penny scales.

Keep reading

People came to the booth to ask the skull questions. A farmer wanted to know if his heifer would calve before the rain. A widow asked after a son who had gone for a soldier. Nell would hold the skull up to the lamp and turn it slowly, and the showman would tell the crowd that the bone had been a bridge-keeper's once, and that bridge-keepers know the answer to everything that crosses, if you ask them plainly. The answers were always yes or no, and nobody ever asked a second time.

On the last night a stranger came without a question. He stood at the edge of the lamplight with his hat in both hands and said nothing for so long that Nell began to count the stitches in his coat. Then he laid a silver shilling on the baize and said, quite quietly, that the bridge had gone down in the flood and the keeper with it, and he only wanted to be told whether the water had taken him gently.

Nell looked at the skull for a long time. It had no eyelids and no mercy, only the fine grey shadows of the rain that had been falling on the tent all week. "Gently," she said at last, because it was the only true thing she could think of that would not make him leave. The man nodded, put the shilling back in his pocket, and walked away into the dark, and the showman never asked her what she had said.