Black and white stippled drawing of a skeleton wearing aviator goggles and a trailing scarf, driving a coffin marked R.I.P. with a winged cross on its lid.

Skeleton driver in a coffin

Black and grey · Flash

A skeleton wearing aviator goggles and a helmet grips a steering wheel inside an open coffin, with a long scarf streaming behind it. The linework is fine and stippled, with dense hatching for shadow and bright highlights on the bones against a solid black background. The coffin lid carries a winged cross and the letters R.I.P. on the front panel, and the image is entirely black, white and grey.

Skeleton Coffin Cross Wing Goggles Scarf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways across the Saturday market since seven, and Nell Haskett had sold exactly one pair of driving goggles, to a man who paid in shirt buttons. She was counting the tin under her awning when the Pratt boy came skidding up Chapel Row, towing a wooden trolley and shouting that the thing had come back.

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It was in the back of the van, just as he'd said. A black Austin with its rear seats gutted and a coffin bolted where they had been, lid propped open, a steering wheel fixed to the inner edge of the box as neatly as a dashboard. Her father had bought it at a clearance auction in Stoke the spring before he died and had never once explained it. Nobody had driven it in eleven years. The stallholders gathered under their tarpaulins to watch, pretending they hadn't.

Nell took her grandmother's green silk scarf from the hook by the till, tied it under her chin, and climbed in. The steering wheel was cold and slick. When she turned the key the engine coughed once, then caught on the first try, and the rain on the windscreen began running upward, away from the glass, like something pulling a sheet off a bed. Down Chapel Row she went at the pace of a slow funeral, the scarf snapping out behind her and the market falling silent as she passed.

At dusk she parked back by her stall. The rain had stopped. Inside the lid, beneath the winged cross and her father's initials, someone had pencilled a new line in careful capitals: NELL, TAKES THE SHOP NOW. She read it twice, then took a pair of goggles from the tin, pulled them down over her eyes, and went to see what the van would do next.