Black and grey traditional tattoo of a skeleton holding a long staff inside a framed tarot card, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton tarot card on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeleton stands in profile, gripping a tall staff, inside a rectangular card frame with a Roman numeral XIII at the top. The linework is bold and even, with fine hatching and solid black areas in the lower scene, which includes a small skull and a face-like figure among foliage. The design is shown in black and grey on smooth skin against a dark background, filling the frame from shoulder to elbow.

Traditional Upper arm Skeleton Staff Roman numeral Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had counted the cards twice before the ferry came in, and twice the thirteenth was missing. Old Nan Tierney had dealt them on the quay every Thursday for thirty years, for tourists who came off the boat with rucksacks and sore heads, and for anyone from the mainland who wanted their future read by a woman who had never once been wrong about the weather. Now Nan was dead, and the deck sat on the kitchen table in a biscuit tin, one dark rectangle gone.

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Mara walked the cliff path to the cottage with the tin under her arm. The wind came off the Atlantic hard enough to lean on. Behind the byre she found a fire that had been built and let go out, and in the grey ash a corner of card, black on the back, with a bone-white edge that might have been a staff. Someone had burned the rest. She remembered the picture from childhood: a skeleton in profile, pushing a long pole through the surf, with a small skull and a drowned face hidden in the weed at the bottom of the frame.

Dara Brennan came up the path with a bucket of mackerel and asked what she had lost. She told him. He shrugged and said his granny had lent the card to his cousin Ciarán for a bet at the pub in March, and that Ciarán had taken the last crossing to Galway with a bag on his shoulder and had not come back. Mara looked out at the water, flat and pewter-coloured, giving nothing away.

That night she laid the twelve cards face up on the table and turned over the one she had drawn for herself at the start of the winter, the card she had never shown anyone. It was the thirteenth after all, the skeleton leaning on his staff, and the staff now pointed at the door. Outside, the tide was turning, and somewhere past the headland a boat's light went slowly out.