Black and grey tattoo of a skull with soft shading and dripping splatter effects on the upper arm of a person in a white vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded skull with drips on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull is tattooed on the outer upper arm, facing forward with hollow eye sockets, a shaded nose cavity and visible teeth. The linework is soft and blended, with grey wash shading, scattered speckles and drips running down from the jaw and across the arm. The photograph is black and white, framed from the shoulder and upper arm with the wearer's face outside the frame.

Realism Upper arm Skull Teeth Drip Splatter

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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

You learn the pit by its sound before anything else. The shift whistle at Crake Hill carries down the terraces at half five, and by the time it has stopped, your mother has the kettle on and your father's boots are steaming by the range. The lamp room smells of paraffin and wet wool. Your father's hands smell of it too, however hard he scrubs at the sink with the grey soap, and the black gets into the creases of his knuckles and stays there.

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The old hewers used to have a skull pricked into the inside of the forearm, a small one with a number beside it, so that if the roof came down and the lamp-men dug for days, somebody would know whose arm to look for. Your father never had one. Uncle Dan did, done in the back room of the Miners' Welfare with a sewing needle and ink made from a burnt cork and a drop of gin. Dan's skull ran into a long blue smudge where he'd sweated through the first night, and he said the drips were the mine coming up through him. Your mother told him to stop talking nonsense in front of the child.

On the morning the cage stuck at the bottom of the shaft, you sat on the wall by the winding house with a bag of cold chips and counted the men coming up. Forty-one, forty-two. Your father was not forty-three. You counted again, slower, the way Dan taught you to count rivets on the tipper wagons. At forty-six the cage clanked and the lamp-men came out with the stretcher, and you did not look at it. You looked instead at the drip of water running from the headgear, shining, steady, down the iron leg into the puddle at your feet, and you wondered how long it had been falling like that without anyone seeing it.