Black and grey skull tattoo with flying birds and painterly brushstrokes across a person's upper back, shaded in a realistic style.

Skull and birds across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the back, with a row of small birds in flight above it and a dark cross-shaped stroke to the right. The skull is shaded in soft greys with heavy black wash and loose, splattered brushwork around its edges. The image is a back view with the subject's face not visible, set against a background of posters and a checked belt.

Realism Back Skull Bird Brushstroke Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas had been raking the kiln's ash for an hour before he saw the skull, pale as a dropped egg in the black. Old Edith Marr had given him the burners' rule on his first day: lift nothing from the ground until the rain has been through it. He went back to the cottage at the wood's edge for the spade anyway, because the light was going and the rooks were coming in low over the pines in ragged threads.

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Edith didn't come out to look. She sat by the stove with her hands round a cup and listened. "That'll be Walter Fenn," she said. "He went up to fell the big ash the winter the river froze, and nobody saw him after. We cut a cross in the bark of that tree and told ourselves it was for the spirits." She sipped. "You'll bury him properly. Not in the kiln."

They went at first light with a sack and a lantern nobody needed. Tomas dug beside the stump, and the earth came away in black wet smears, like the wash a painter lays down before any detail goes on. Small birds lifted off the hedge and crossed the clearing in a loose line, quick and certain, then gone, and he thought how much they looked like strokes of a brush.

When the grave was filled, Edith pressed a crow feather into the soil with her thumb. "Walter liked the view from up here," she said. "You can see the whole village, and it can't see you." Tomas cut one notch into the stump with his knife and went down the hill with the empty sack over his shoulder and the forest floor still clinging to his boots.