Black and grey realism skull tattoo with red shading in the eye socket and mouth, placed on the upper back.

Realistic skull with red accents on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large human skull with an open, screaming jaw fills the frame, with teeth and jawbone rendered in fine detail. The skull is shaded in soft greys and black with a sketchy, smudged edge, and the eye socket and mouth are filled with vivid red and orange. The skin texture and a curved body contour suggest it sits on the upper back, with the design centred in the frame.

Realism Back Skull Teeth Bone

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

Brother Osric had dug graves at Saint Edda's for thirty winters, and he knew the ground under the fen better than the psalms. So when the abbot sent him to lift the old charnel bones before the new wall went up, he took his spade, a lantern and a sack, and went down alone.

Keep reading

The bones lay in a heap beneath the chapter house, stacked the way the first brothers had left them. Near the bottom he found a skull with its jaw hanging open as though it had been caught mid-shout. Someone had once pressed a red wax seal into the eye hollow, and the wax had gone soft and dark with age. Osric meant to tip it into the sack with the rest, but when he lifted it the lantern flame leaned toward the mouth and a cold breath came up out of the throat of the hill.

He heard it then, faint as a cart on a far road: a voice saying his name, in the abbot's own tone. He did not answer. He carried the skull up the steps in both hands, set it on the altar step, and told the abbot he had found nothing but mud. The abbot looked at the open jaw for a long while and said only, "Then bury it where it cannot be heard."

Osric dug a hole beside the north wall, dropped the skull in, and filled it with the fen's black earth. That night the bell rang once, short and sharp, and no one in the house could say who had pulled the rope. Nobody asked the abbot, and nobody asked Osric, who went on digging graves and never again lifted a bone without first saying the name of whoever had owned it.