Close photo of a rough red line drawing of a skull on the upper arm near the elbow, set against a plastic-covered backdrop.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red sketched skull on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A rough red linework design of a skull or animal head sits on the inner upper arm near the elbow. The lines are loose and sketchy, with some broken and uneven strokes and a few small dots of red around the edges. The image is a close phone photo with a plain dark plastic backdrop and a white sheet visible at the bottom.

Upper arm Skull Animal head Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lines had to be loose, Mrs Pell said, or the sea would take the drawing for a true thing and come up the steps after it. She kept the red ochre in a tin that once held tea, on the windowsill of number nine, where the lodgers could see it and leave it be.

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Joss came in October with a pack and a cough, and found the horned skull on the shingle below the groyne, bleached the colour of old bread. He carried it up the cliff path under his coat and nobody asked him why. He set it on the kitchen dresser and sketched it in red, quick and careless, breaking his strokes wherever the bone had cracked, and flicked the ochre off his fingers onto the wood.

The storm came on the third night. The wind rattled the slates like a crowd wanting in. Mrs Pell went from door to door with the tin, dabbing one dot at each hinge and muttering the names of the drowned. In the morning the groyne was splinters, the shingle was bare, and the boarding house stood with its doors shut and red specks along every frame.

Joss stayed on through the winter. The skull was gone from the dresser. On the kitchen table lay a single red dot the size of a thumbnail, still wet. "It came back for its drawing," Mrs Pell said, and wiped the rest of the tin clean on her apron.