Solid black flash design of a small skull with crossbones set within a sweeping dark shape, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and crossbones in a black silhouette

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black graphic on a plain white background. A small skull with round eye sockets and a jagged jaw sits at the right, with crossed bones below it, all set within a large sweeping solid black shape. The design uses flat black fills with rough, uneven edges and no visible greys or colour.

Blackwork Skull Crossbones

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The weevils had got into the ship's bread again, and you were sieving them out over the scuttle with a fork when Pugh came down the companionway, bent under the low beam and smelling of wet tar. He wanted the rum cask opened for the watch. You told him the cask was sealed and the mate held the key, and he said the mate was drunk in the forepeak and would stay that way until Thursday, so you could either give him the cask or explain to the captain why the men had gone mutinous over a thimble.

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You had a pot of lamp black for marking the stores, a stiff brush, and a stencil your father cut from an old sailmaker's board. You stood the stencil on the cask head and worked fast, the little round eyes first, then the jaw, which came out jagged because your hand would not keep still. The crossed bones went under it in long strokes, ragged at the ends where the brush ran dry. Pugh watched it take shape and said nothing, which was the closest thing to a blessing you were likely to get aboard.

When the mate woke he would see the mark and leave the cask alone. No man on the Ellen Mary had ever broken a skull-marked cask, not since the year the surgeon's grog turned out to be laudanum and two boys went over the side trying to sleep it off. You wiped the brush on your apron. The black would not come off your thumb for a week, and every time you reached into the flour sack you saw it there, a small dark jaw grinning up at you.