Realistic colour tattoo of an amber skull beneath a black bare tree with grey splatter marks, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and bare tree on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large amber and orange skull sits in the centre of the design, with a black bare tree growing across its top and branches fading into a pale grey sky. Soft shading gives the skull volume, while black brushstroke bands and ink splatters extend down the lower part of the arm. The palette is mostly warm yellows and oranges against black and grey.

Realism Upper arm Skull Tree Splatter Moon Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up out of the silt on the third day of the dust season, and Oda wanted it sold before the grit storms closed the salvage road. Nobody on Tessel Flats kept bones. We kept water credits and copper wire and whatever the reclaimers left behind, and a sun-bleached skull was worth two rations to a man who collected curiosities for the tower markets.

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I carried it under my coat for nine kilometres. It warmed against my ribs, the way old resin does when the day's heat soaks into it, and by the time I reached the last standing pylon the amber of it had gone the colour of a struck match. Oda was waiting beneath the one tree left on the flats, a crooked thing with black limbs that had not leafed in forty years. He turned the skull over in his hands and said nothing for a long while.

'Where did you find it?' he asked at last. 'Under the dead orchard, where the old fuel spill makes the ground look painted.' He laughed, which he never did. 'Then it was never a skull. It was a lamp.' He set it on the pylon's base, and the low sun came through the eye sockets and threw a bar of light across the black dust, and for once the grey sky above the tree looked like it had something to hold.

We never sold it. Oda hung the skull from the tree's highest branch on a copper wire, and each dusk it caught the last of the light and burned like a coal in a grate. The tower buyers stopped coming up the road. Nobody on the flats ever asked what it was for.