Black and grey tattoo of two skeletons, a man in a bowler hat and a woman with a feathered hat, framed by laurel branches on a calf.

Skeleton couple in Victorian dress on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows two skeletons in formal dress: a man in a bowler hat and suit, and a woman wearing a feathered hat, pearl necklace and high-necked Victorian gown. Laurel sprigs curve above and beside them, and the figures sit within a rounded composition. The shading is smooth and tonal, with fine highlights on the pearls and feathers, and the design fills a large area of the lower leg.

Neo-trad Calf Skeleton Couple Pearl Laurel Suit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the Shambles since noon, and Mrs Honoria Vane had not once lowered her parasol. She stood under the awning of Pell's oyster stall with the feather in her hat drooping like a wet gull, and watched her husband haggle with a boy over the price of a half-dozen cockles.

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Pell had worn the same bowler since the Bath Assembly of 1868, when they had danced three rounds of the galop and been awarded a laurel crown that nobody could afterwards find. The crown had gone to a glover's daughter from Clifton. Honoria had never forgiven the judges, though she could not say which of them had cheated, only that the lamps seemed to dim whenever she was dancing well.

Now the market bell rang five and the gas came up in a yellow row along the stalls. Pell pressed a coin into the boy's palm, tipped his hat to her, and offered his arm across the slick cobbles as if the ballroom floor still stretched out beneath them. She took it. Their bones clicked together softly, like cutlery settling in a drawer.

Behind them the rain thinned to a drizzle and the costermongers began to pack their barrows. Honoria tilted her head toward the sky, where a single gap had opened above the chimney pots. "Waltz," she said. Pell looked down at her, grinning through the teeth he had never bothered to hide, and for once the lamps along the Shambles held perfectly steady.