Colour tattoo on the upper arm of a skeleton wearing a hooded veil and crown, holding a rosary above a flaming red heart with thorns, in neo-traditional style.

Skeleton in veil with crown and sacred heart

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A skeleton wearing a hooded veil and a crown of beaded points faces forward, with its bony hands clasped in prayer around a rosary. Below the hands, a red heart wrapped in thorns sits within rays of light and flame. The skull and bones are shaded in greys with smooth gradients, while the veil, crown and background use reds, oranges and teal, and the tattoo wraps the upper arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Skeleton Skull Crown Veil Rosary Heart Thorn Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had come in sideways across the Saturday market since dawn, and Maud Clery had given up pretending the awning kept it off her stock. She set the votive candles out in rows on the trestle, each glass jar bearing a saint who had lost most of his paint to the damp. Nobody came to her stall for the saints. They came for the thing she kept under the till in a square of green baize: a tin sacred heart, enamel-red, ringed with brass thorns, and beside it a rosary of bone-coloured beads her mother had prayed on every night for forty years.

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At half eleven a boy in a wet anorak asked whether she sold candles for the dead. Maud said she sold candles for whoever was asking, and the boy said his nan had died on Thursday and would want one lit at the little chapel behind the bus station, the one nobody else went to. Maud wrapped a tall white candle in brown paper and charged him nothing, then found she was counting the beads with her thumb while she talked.

When he had gone she unwrapped the baize. Her mother had always said the heart was for the people still alive enough to be frightened, and that the crown and veil belonged to those who had already got through and were kind enough to wait. Maud had never believed a word of it, and had kept the heart anyway, the way you keep a coat you don't like because it still fits.

By four the light was going and the rain had thinned to a fine grey mist. Maud lit one candle on the trestle, cupped her hand round the flame, and watched it throw its small gold rays across the wet tarmac. She blew it out, wrapped the heart again, and packed up without dropping a single bead.