Traditional flash design of a skeleton with crossed arms inside a black coffin-shaped bottle with a red cap.

Skeleton in a coffin-shaped bottle

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A skeleton with crossed arms and splayed hands stands inside a coffin-shaped bottle with a red stopper. The bold black outlines and flat grey and white shading on the bones give a traditional flash look against a dark, gradient background. The design is centred on a cream paper ground with a small red accent on the cap.

Traditional Skeleton Coffin Bottle Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had the stopper half lifted before the mule cart reached the top of the Col de Saule, and when the wind snatched at her hood she pressed it back down with her thumb and swore in her father's dialect. The bottles knocked together under the tarpaulin like teeth. There were eleven of them, each coffin-shaped, each sealed with red wax that had cracked in the cold.

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Her father had blown them in the cellar at Vieil-Bourg for thirty years. Bitter gentian, a splash of brandy, and a painted skeleton fixed inside the glass with its arms crossed over its ribs, as if it were bored of waiting. Customers paid extra for the skeleton. Marta had never understood why until the toll-keeper's wife at the hut below the pass sent a boy running up the track with a coin in each fist and a cough that rattled like gravel in a tin.

The keeper's wife would not take the tonic without seeing the bones. "Show me what's in it," she said through the cloth at her mouth, and Marta, who had never once read the label, tipped the bottle to the lamp. The skeleton stood as it always did, arms crossed, splayed hands at its shoulders. Only the stopper seemed wrong, the red wax gone soft and tacky in the heat of her palm.

The woman laughed, dry and sudden, with no cough in it at all. Her husband had carried one of these bottles up the pass every spring, she said, and every spring he had come back down without it. Marta pushed the cork home. She set the bottle on the sill facing the road, folded her own arms over her chest the way the bones did, and waited for the wind to drop before she started back down the track alone.