Realistic skull tattoo with a dotwork ornament across the back of a hand, shaded in tan, brown and black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic skull tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A realistic human skull fills the back of the hand, with its jaw and teeth toward the fingers. Soft, detailed shading gives the bone a three-dimensional look, and a dotwork pattern in pale ochre and beige sits behind it along the wrist. The palette is mostly muted browns, tans and black against the dark background, with the photograph lit to show the skin and ink clearly.

Realism Dotwork Hand Skull Dotwork Ornament Bone Teeth

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 lamp had been left burning again, and Margaret Pell would be the one explaining it to the trustees, so she switched it off before she lifted the lid. Beneath it, on a bed of grey tissue, the skull from the Hollis estate lay turned slightly toward the window, as if it wanted to see who had come in so late.

Keep reading

The carving was finer than the catalogue had promised. Someone had worked a collar of pierced dots around the crown, hundreds of them, each pricked into the bone with a tool no thicker than a darning needle, then rubbed with ochre until the holes looked like sand dried in a shell. Margaret took her loupe from her cardigan pocket and began to count, the way you might count stitches to keep your mind from wandering. She reached eighty before she noticed the dots were not evenly spaced. They came in clusters of seven, with a gap after each.

Desmond had the estate notebook open on the bench behind her. The carver had been a Gosport rigger who came home from a convoy that never reached port, and his widow had written in the margin of the inventory that he marked each day he was gone with one hole, no more and no less. Margaret looked at the clusters again. Seven days, a gap, seven days. Somewhere near the crown the count stopped, four hundred and twelve holes in, and the bone beyond it was left smooth.

She did not finish the count. She laid the loupe on the tissue, wrapped the jaw in its paper, and wrote in pencil on the box lid: incomplete, not for cleaning. Then she turned the lamp back on, because someone would ask, and she would rather say it had been her.