Six numbered pencil sketches of skulls in varying shapes and shading, shown as possible tattoo design options.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six numbered pencil skull sketches

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows six numbered pencil sketches of skulls arranged in two rows of three. The skulls vary in shape, size and tilt, with some drawn front-on and others at a slight angle. Linework is loose and sketched, with areas of hatched and smudged graphite shading in the eye sockets and under the cheekbones on a plain white background.

Skull Sketch Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of Pelling's Travelling Wonders had nine wet days left in it when Abel Pelling asked Tilly Harrow to draw him a skull for the tent flap. She sat on an upturned crate with her board on her knee and drew six in a row, because he had asked for a choice and she had never once in twenty years been allowed to give him less.

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He looked at number one for a long time. It had a narrow head like a pear and a jaw that hung too far. 'That one is hungry,' he said. 'I need one that's already had its supper.' Number two was grand, all shadow and heft, the sort of skull a bishop keeps on his desk. 'Too proud. Nobody pays a penny to be told they'll die by someone who thinks himself clever.' Number three had a cracked brow where the pencil had wandered, and number four looked sideways at the gate as if it were counting the takings. Number five was straight and sensible, and he set it aside without a word.

He picked up number six last, the one with the wide, dark sockets and a tooth gone, and turned it toward the lamp. 'This one. The eyes are full of nothing. When the lamps go down, that's what they'll remember.'

Tilly painted it onto the flap that night in tar and ochre, and the rain came through the canvas by morning. The crowds that came back in spring, for a show with no elephants and no clown, stood in the mud and looked up at the dark holes in the cloth, and nobody could say afterwards whether they had laughed or gone quiet.