Black and grey realistic skull tattoo wrapped in a bandana, shown on the upper arm.

Realistic skull with bandana on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull with a knotted bandana wrapped around the head, one eye socket partly covered by the fabric. The shading is soft and smooth, with strong contrast in the eye sockets and teeth and fine highlights on the cloth folds. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink against a blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the kettle, it spits when it's close to the boil, and let me tell you about Hennie Gaunt and the summer the fair came over the causeway at Porthallow. There were two elephants on a flatbed, a man who swallowed swords outside the chapel, and a lion tamer's nephew called Dacre Pell who wore a red bandana knotted tight at the back of his head, even when he was eating his chips.

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Hennie wanted that bandana more than he wanted his tea. He swept the big top for three weeks, and on the last night Dacre lost it to him across a card table behind the bakery, for a shilling and the promise that Hennie would climb the lighthouse rail at low tide. He did climb it. The wind took his cap and nearly took him too, and when he came down with a split lip, Dacre only laughed and said the cloth would keep the sea out of a man's eye, if he tied it the proper way.

So Hennie tied it proper, over the left eye, the way he'd seen the nephew do, and walked up the High Street as though the whole town had been waiting for him. Old Mrs Tregear looked at him over the post office counter. The fishermen went quiet at the slipway. He thought it made him look like a pirate out of a picture book, and that was the whole joke of it for near enough sixty years.

Dacre never got the bandana back. He went off with the fair in the autumn, and the last Hennie heard, he was in a travelling show in Ireland with his one good eye on the knife thrower's wife. The cloth is still in the drawer under my chair, folded small, and when the weather turns I take it out, tie it on, and tell the story again to whoever's sat near enough to hear.

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