Black and grey realistic skull tattoo covering the back of a hand, with a tribal pattern continuing up the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded skull on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the back of the hand, with a heart-shaped nasal cavity, a dotted bead detail beside one eye socket and a scrolled ornament near the other. The skull is rendered in soft grey shading with fine textured lines that follow the skin's surface, and dark outlines give the bone depth. The image is a close, slightly angled view of the hand against a blurred background, with a tribal design visible on the forearm above.

Realism Blackwork Hand Forearm Skull Hand Ornament Tribal pattern Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men at Wheal Ysolde said the thing under the shaft kept its own count, and it was never wrong by more than one. Old Mary Pascoe told Jacky Rowse this the week the cage came up without his brother Sam in it. Jacky did not believe in the knockers any more than he believed the rain would stop, but he took a string of jet beads from his mother's drawer anyway, because she had asked him to.

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He went down on the Tuesday with a lamp and the beads buttoned into his coat. At the thirtieth fathom the rock opened into a cross-drift, and there it sat on a ledge of ore: a skull with a dark heart cut into its face, the bone grey as cold ash, a row of small beads running along one socket and a curl of scrolled iron beside the other. It held out one long hand. Jacky understood that it wanted the beads, and that it would take them one at a time, and that each one given would send a man up the shaft.

He counted them into its palm. The skull counted with him, clicking the bones of its fingers against each bead. When he reached the last one, the one he had kept back for himself, the thing closed its hand and looked at him for a long while. Then it lifted Sam from the stone and set him across Jacky's shoulders like a sack of tallow.

They came up together at dawn. Mary Pascoe counted the men in the cage and found one more than she expected, and she did not say so. Jacky wears the last bead on a string round his wrist still, and when the bell rings at the shaft head he counts it through twice, in case the thing has kept one of its own.