Flat grey skull design on a white background, with large eye sockets, a heart-shaped nose and a row of teeth, drawn as a simple outline stencil.

Simple grey skull design

Black and grey · Flash

A simple skull drawn in flat grey tones on a white background. The eye sockets, nose and teeth are filled in grey, while the cranium and jaw sit as shaded crescents at either side of the head. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with no shading or texture beyond the flat fills.

Skull Teeth Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonkwo's stencil knife had gone blunt by Thursday, and Ruth Ferrier knew better than to ask the foreman for another. The job was a hundred and twelve brass plates for the mill's new loading bay, each one a skull with its jaw hung open like a gate, and the council inspector wanted every one alike to the millimetre.

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Ruth cut them at the bench under a lamp that buzzed. She learned to trust the shape of the teeth more than the ruler: eight small ones along the top, a pair of longer front ones in the middle, each a little lozenge with its point turned towards the floor. When the nose came out right, a neat inverted heart, the whole face settled. The cheekbones were the trouble. They curved out from the crown in two grey crescents that swept down past the temples like brackets holding the thing up, and every time her blade slipped on them she had to start the plate again.

On the last Friday the inspector came early and stood over her shoulder. He tapped the plate she had just finished. "Too even," he said. "Nobody's skull is that symmetrical."

Ruth looked at him for a long moment, then at the sheet of brass. "Then it's a good likeness of the drawing," she said, and held out the knife, handle first, so he could cut the next one himself.