Close-up of a red kiss mark lips tattoo on skin, with a skull and a cross-like motif inside the lips.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lips kiss mark with skull

Colour · Photo

A close-up of a lips kiss mark tattoo filled with red ink and outlined in dark ink. A small skull and a cross-like shape sit inside the lower part of the lips, with the rest of the lips left as bare skin. The shading is textured and the composition is centred on the tattoo, with a strip of lace visible at the top of the frame.

Lip Skull Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the pair of you, and mind the draught from the kitchen door, because Mrs Pryce never let a thing go cold if she could help it. You'll have seen the letters pinned behind the bar at the Gull Rest. Every one of them carries the same red mouth pressed into the corner, and nobody in Porthgwidden has ever been able to tell you whose it was.

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Agnes Pryce kept that boarding house for thirty-one years on the strength of one kiss. Her husband Tom sailed the Constance Ruth out past the Hanging Stone in March of 1903 and never came back through the bay. Agnes wrote him a letter every Sunday after that, sealed each one with carmine from the tin her sister sent from London, and pressed her mouth to the paper so he'd have something of her to carry. The parish clerk swore she was a little mad. The fishermen swore she was not.

The turn came in the autumn of 1911, when a bottle of ink tipped over the blotter and the latest letter came out with a skull showing through the lower lip, grinning up off the page as if it had been waiting. Agnes stared at it a long while. Then she took a pin and a little Indian ink and worked a cross in beside it, the way her mother's people had marked the drowned. Nobody in the bay ever learned whether it was a warning or a farewell, and Agnes only ever said the sea had signed for its share.

Tom came home in 1912, on a borrowed boat and with one arm, and read every letter standing up in the hallway. He found the skull on the last one. He laughed till he coughed, then sat down on the stairs and wept, and Agnes let the kettle boil over for once. That, my dears, is why the Gull Rest has never once burned its toast.