Black and grey shaded skull tattoo with vine details covering the back of a hand against a black background.

Shaded skull with vines on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the back of the hand, with shaded eye sockets, a detailed nose cavity and a row of upper and lower teeth. Dark outlines and grey gradients give the skull a rounded, three-dimensional look, and thin vines with leaves wrap around its left and right sides. The image is in black and grey against a plain black background, with the hand and fingers centred in the frame.

Realism Hand Skull Vine Teeth Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the third one from the bottom, it has been giving way since my grandmother's time and nobody in this valley has ever troubled to mend it. Come in out of the snow. The fire is banked but it will rise when you feed it the dry pine. Now, you asked about the skull that hangs above the lintel of the Cold Hearth Inn, the one with the ivy growing through its teeth. Old Ruth Marrable put it there. She was a gardener at the big house up the pass before the fever took the family, and she had a habit of pressing whatever the frost killed between the pages of her ledgers.

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The winter of the long freeze, a traveller came up from the coast with a bag of seed and a bad cough, and he asked Ruth to grow him something that would outlast the snow. She told him nothing outlasts the snow. He laughed at her and went on up the pass, and in March the thaw found him sitting against a boulder with his hands open and vine running out of his sleeves. Ruth went up with a spade and dug him out. What she found in his coat was a gardener's knife and a small grey skull no bigger than a fist, polished smooth, its eye hollows full of earth.

She set the skull in the window of the inn and let the ivy climb it. Every spring the leaves reach a little further across the bone, and every spring the skull's mouth opens a fraction wider, though the wood frame never moves. Ruth said the seed had wanted a grave, and she had given it a window instead, which was the kinder bargain. Pour yourself the last of that cider. No, it's on the house. The snow will be ankle deep by morning and the pass is shut until the thaw.