Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a skeletal Uncle Sam in a striped top hat pointing forward, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal Uncle Sam on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal figure in a star-spangled top hat and a jacket points towards the viewer, with a partly cropped design beneath it. The linework is bold and outlined, with grey shading that gives the jacket and skull depth. The design runs up the forearm, and the image is taken straight on against a dark, checked background.

Traditional Forearm Skeleton Top hat Jacket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the recruiting poster nailed to the gatepost of Carrow Keep, the one with the hand pointing out of the paper, and you laugh because the castle has been roofless since the Civil War and nobody has bothered to pull the notices down. The ink has gone brown with age. The man in the star-spangled hat has a face like a cracked jug, and his finger has been drawn so that wherever you stand in the courtyard, it lands on you.

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The village schoolmaster, Mr Pellow, says the figure walks the battlements on the night before the lambing sales. Nobody believes him until the lamps go out at the Crown and you see the grey coat moving between the broken arches, the top hat tilted, bony fingers hooked towards the road. You go up anyway, because your brother went up last winter and never came down to the valley, and because your boots are already on the wet stones.

At the top of the east tower he is waiting, leaning on a cannon with no carriage. He does not speak. He only points, and when you look where the finger goes you see your own name chalked on the lintel, under a column of names, each with a small tick beside it. Yours is the last one without a tick. Behind you the sky over the moor has begun to grey.

You take the chalk from his palm. It is light as a feather, and you find that you are writing the tick yourself, and then, because the castle forgets nothing, you add a line beneath it, a promise that you will come home for the harvest. The skeleton tips his hat, the cold lifts off the stones, and by sunrise the poster is gone from the gatepost, though the nail still holds a single curl of paper, blank on one side.