Traditional-style tattoo of two skulls and a banner on the upper back of a person in a white lace dress, with tattooed hands holding beer bottles.

Skull and banner tattoo on a lace-backed dress

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back tattoo shows two skulls, one with a red mohawk-like crest, above a curled banner with lettering, set against a dark background. The bold outlines and solid shading are typical of traditional work, and the tattoo is mostly grey and black with touches of red and yellow. The white lace dress frames the design, and tattooed hands holding bottles and a hand tattoo are also visible.

Traditional Back Hand Skull Banner Lettering Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The twins came in on a Thursday with a beer mat folded inside a shoebox, and the drawing on it was two skulls, one with a red crest like a cockerel's comb, leaning into each other above a banner that curled out at the bottom like a loose ribbon. Their gran had died that spring. She had played the organ at a chapel in Rochdale for forty years and never once been seen without a bottle of stout at her elbow, and they wanted her inked somewhere she could keep an eye on things.

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I traced the design onto greaseproof paper over two evenings and fussed the banner until the lettering sat flat. Everybody who saw the sketch said the red was too loud. Declan, the elder, said she'd have hated it quiet. The sitting took six hours with a tea break at three, and he held a bottle in each hand the whole time and drank neither. He told me how she'd once pinched the communion wine and blamed the vicar's dog, and I laughed so hard I had to wipe the outline twice.

When I finished he looked at the work in the mirror for a long while. Then he said the shading along the jaw was exactly how she'd looked when she was cross with the choir.

Two years later Declan rang the shop from a function room somewhere near Oldham. Somebody had asked him where the skulls came from, and he wanted to know if I thought the banner would still read properly after all that time. I told him the words had never needed to be perfect, only loud enough to be read across a room.