Traditional style forearm tattoo of a skull and crossbones inside a heart-shaped panel with red wash, framed by grey scrollwork and playing card spades.

Skull and crossbones in an ornate spade frame on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey skull with crossbones sits in a heart-shaped panel filled with a soft red wash, with a small red star below. The panel is framed by a heavy black outline, dotted border and grey scrolling ornament topped with a spade motif. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the forearm against a dark background, with a blurred outline tattoo visible at the upper left.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Skull Crossbones Heart Spade Star Scrollwork Playing card

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Kenny counted the cards a second time because the lift had jolted to a stop between the seventh and eighth floors of Hollins House and there was nothing else to do with his hands. Fifty-one. One short, which meant Nan's pontoon night would end with her accusing somebody of cheating, and that somebody would be him.

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Dot Ashby, two floors down in her dressing gown, shouted up the shaft that the engineer was coming on Thursday, and Kenny shouted back that Thursday was a lie. They had played on the landing since the block went up, always with a spade laid in the middle, because Nan said a spade was the only suit that never pretended. The one he had brought up that evening was an old card with a grey skull sitting in a red heart, ringed by black scrollwork that looked like it had been drawn by someone who had once seen a cathedral and wanted a bit of it for themselves.

He found the missing card at last, wedged under his own trainer with one corner bent. He thought about the skull and the crossed bones and the little red star below them, and how the only things in the building that had ever really frightened anyone were the ones printed most politely. He slid the card back into the pack. The lift lurched, then rose, and the doors opened on the eighth floor where Nan stood in her slippers with her hand held out.

"Fifty-two," she said. "Now sit down and lose properly."