Red-ink skull tattoo with a blood splatter effect across a woman's shoulder and upper chest, photographed in a tattoo studio.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red skull with blood splatter on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A skull is drawn in red ink on the upper chest near the shoulder, with soft shading inside the skull and along the jaw. Loose red splatters and drips radiate outwards from it across the skin, and one spatter sits further along the shoulder. The image is a close crop with a blurred studio background, and the tattoo is the clear focus.

Shoulder Skull Drip

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop eyeing the bandstand as if the trumpeter might start up a ghost. This is the Palais the winter the north gallery burned, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, loud enough to carry over the saxophones. The man in it was Ivo Hatch, a sign-painter who came up from Ferris Street with a tin of vermilion he'd been saving for a wedding he never got to paint. The dance committee wanted a skull above the stage for the marathon, something to frighten the sponsors into paying out, so Ivo climbed the scaffold and painted one in red, soft in the eye sockets and running down the jaw like it had been crying.

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The damp got into the plaster by the second week. The skull bled. Drips crept down the wall in lines nobody had painted, and little spatters crusted on the parquet below, and the dancers who stayed past midnight came off the floor with a red print blooming on the skin, always on the left shoulder, always where the skull seemed to be looking. Ivo laughed about it at the bar, said it was a cheap trick of the light. Then one Saturday he went up the scaffold to touch up the jaw and never came down the same man. His own shoulder had gone the colour of that wall, and the more he danced, and he danced every night after that with anybody who would have him, the brighter it glowed.

They closed the marathon the spring after. The skull was whitewashed, the floor was relaid, and the committee swore the stains would come out with bleach. They never did. Walk the Palais on a damp evening and you can still find a faint pink spatter by the fire door, and if the band plays "Stardust" slow enough, somebody always claims they've seen a red figure turning alone in the middle of the floor, one hand on an empty shoulder. So if your partner's skin flushes when you hold them close, don't let go. Just keep dancing until the music stops.