Outlined skull tattoo in red and blue on a calf, with the two colours offset to create a doubled, misregistered effect.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and blue skull on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A skull in simple outline drawn in red and blue, with the blue line offset from the red so the skull appears doubled. The teeth are drawn as a row of zigzag marks along the jaw, with a small blue-filled area in the eye socket. The tattoo sits on a lower leg against a white lace background, with a partial dotwork tattoo visible at the top right edge.

Calf Skull Teeth Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Ash kept the ferry at Sallow Reach, and the men who crossed in winter paid her in whatever they had stopped being able to see. The spectacle-seller came over on the last boat before the ice, a thin man with a case strapped to his back, and he set two lenses on the wet planks between them: one rimmed in red, one in blue.

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"Hold them one before the other," he said, "and the far bank comes nearer. Hold them apart and you see the skull that walks behind every face." She said she had no time for riddles, but the current was slow and she had nothing better to do with her hands, so she lifted the spectacles to her eyes. Red on the left, blue on the right, and the reeds went double, the sky split like a loose seam. Then she saw the boatman's skull, drawn in two offset lines, its jaw working in a row of jagged teeth as he counted her coins.

She took the spectacles off and the man was only a man, grey-bearded and cold. But she could not stop thinking about the jaw. Each night she put the lenses on and watched the village go about its business, and every one of them wore their bone the way a coat hangs, a little loose, the blue line lagging a breath behind the red. She began ferrying them across for nothing, and then she began asking what they owed.

The spectacle-seller came back in March for his lenses. She had hidden them in the eel-box. He found her at the stern with the water high and the reeds hissing. "You saw it," he said. "I did," she said, "and I have stopped being frightened of it, which is worse for you." He took the lenses and went west on foot, and the ferry drifted out to the middle of the reach where nobody could hail it, and Mother Ash, who had never once looked back, looked back.