Realism tattoo of a shaded skull with blue and grey tones across the back of a hand, with smoky grey and purple shading running up the forearm.

Shaded skull on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A large skull fills the back of the hand, with deep eye sockets, a ridged nasal area and teeth picked out in soft grey shading. Blue ink glows around the lower skull and the edges of the eye sockets, while the forearm above carries smoky grey and purple swirls that fade toward the wrist. The photograph is taken close up at an angle, with the subject's jeans visible at the left edge and no face shown.

Realism Hand Forearm Skull Smoke Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on, and mind the third stair, it still creaks like a gull with a grievance. Good. Sit where the lamp can reach your face. You'll not have heard of the Skull Light at Greywater Wall, because nobody under sixty has seen it burn, and the Tidewardens took the glass out of its eyes the year the salt-wells failed. But my mother's mother kept it lit for thirty winters, and she told me this with her hands folded on her knees, the way I'm telling you.

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The wall ran out from the old harbour into the grey smoke that rolled off the foundries, and the smoke came in ribbons, black at the bottom and violet near the top, like oil on a puddle. Ships out of the drowned quarter steered by that skull. Its jaw was a ridge of iron, its teeth were scratched in soft pewter, and its sockets held blue fire fed by gas from the wrecks. Ottilie Vane climbed up every dusk with a brass can and a rag, and she polished those sockets until the light came off them like cold water.

Then came the winter the Wardens said the gas was wanted for the mills. They sent a man up a ladder to pull the fire out. Ottilie stood at the foot of the wall with her arms folded and told him the light was never for ships. It was for the people still out in the fog, who could not see the wall and only knew the skull was there. The man went back down the ladder. She lit the lamp herself that night and stood in the mist calling names until the boats came home one by one, the last of them at first light.

So when the mist comes up the estuary now, my neighbours leave a candle in the window and say the names of the people still out. Drink your tea. It's gone cold, but that's the sea for you.