Black and grey realism skull tattoo with bone and organic detail covering the upper arm and shoulder of a woman in a dark vest top.

Realistic skull on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the upper arm and reaches toward the shoulder, with its teeth open and jaw partly visible. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey gradients on the cranium and sharper dark shadows in the eye sockets and between the teeth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink against the skin, with a dark vest top and a red wall in the background.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Skull Bone Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up in the shingle after the February gales, and Mrs Haskell set it on the hall windowsill of Seafield House before breakfast, as if it were a lost glove. Nobody else would touch it. I did, because I was the only lodger with nothing to lose by being thought peculiar.

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It was grey all over, the colour of wet slate, with dark pits where the eyes had been and a jaw that hung open a finger's width. Every morning I dusted it with a shaving brush. The shadows gathered in the cracks between the teeth, and the crown had a faint sheen, as though someone had rubbed it with lamp oil years ago. Mr Cotter, who ran the pier kiosk, swore it belonged to a sailor drowned off the Lune, and that a sailor's skull never lies still in sand unless it wants something.

I didn't believe him, but I took to talking to it. I told it about the tram timetable, the price of kippers, the girl at the chemist who hummed Sinatra under her breath. In March the jaw slipped and a molar rolled loose into my palm. Tucked beneath it was a strip of tin with a name scratched in capitals: ALBERT. Mrs Haskell said Albert had been her husband's brother, lost at sea in 1921, and that she had not said his name aloud in that house in forty years.

I wrapped the tooth in tissue and put it in my coat. On the train south I kept my hand in my pocket, feeling its small hard weight, and when the conductor called the stations I thought of the jaw on the windowsill, still hanging open, still waiting for someone to close it.