Black and grey traditional style flash design of a skeleton framed by banners reading COME BACK TO LIFE, with a VERB banner at the top.

Skeleton with come back to life banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A skeleton stands centred on a pale speckled background, partly overlapped by a solid black silhouette of a figure behind it, with its head, ribs and pelvis shown in white. Bold outlines and flat solid black areas give a classic flash feel, and the text sits on four stacked ribbon banners with a smaller banner above. The design uses only black and white with grey texture, arranged in a tall, symmetrical composition.

Traditional Skeleton Banner Silhouette Ribs Lettering Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ribbons were my idea, which is why I was up the ladder on Tuesday with a tin of size and a brush between my teeth, re-lettering the last of them before the Saturday dance. Mr Pryce had wanted the old sign taken down altogether. VERB, it had said above the bandstand since the war, a joke nobody under forty understood, and below it the skeleton holding COME BACK TO LIFE on four stacked banners like a waiter with a tray.

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Ivy Crane had played the upright under that sign for thirty-one years. She took the waltzes slow enough for the widows to hold on and quick enough that the sailors could show off. When her heart gave out in March, the committee put a card on the piano lid and nothing else, and the floor went quiet on Saturdays in a way I did not care for.

I finished the last L after the lights were off. The cheap paint had cracked in the cold, so I went over the bones again, and the black shape behind the skeleton I gave a little more lean at the shoulder, because Ivy always leaned into the keys. Then I sat on the edge of the stage and picked out the first bar of the Tennessee Waltz on the lid, badly, the way she would have told me off for.

On Saturday the floor was half empty. Then the first chord came, Mrs Hobbs from the chip shop stepped out with a pensioner in a cardigan, and somebody at the back said the sign had a point. Verb, I thought, looking up at the bones. A doing word. I watched them dance under it until the lights came up.