Small black and grey fine line skull and crossbones tattoo on the upper arm, with a floral-patterned top visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and crossbones on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small skull with crossbones sits on the outer upper arm of a person with light skin. The skull is drawn in fine black linework with soft stippled shading on the cranium and bones. The ink is black and grey only, set against a plain skin background with a floral print top at the right edge of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Skull Crossbones

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has already swallowed the causeway when you reach the landing, and Abel Crouch stands in the spray with his cap crushed in both fists as though it might get away from him. He does not say the boat is late. He says the Mary Anne went onto Scarrow Shoal at two in the morning, and that your uncle, the keeper before you, wrote the shoal's name in the logbook with a line drawn under it, the way he wrote everything he feared.

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You take the lamp room key from its nail and climb with the wind leaning on the tower like a shoulder. Up top the lens turns its slow white arm over the water, and far below, in the wet sand, a gull works at something pale. In the store cupboard you find the tally board. Someone has painted a small skull over two crossed bones beside a column of names. Nine names, then a ruled line, then a tenth with no date.

The skull is a bookkeeper's mark, your uncle told you once over a game of cards. Wreckers wrote their dead in the same ink they used for their takings, so no widow could ask what she was owed. You scrub at the tenth name with a rag and lamp oil, and it does not come off. It was never paint. The grain of the wood has taken the nib deep, and the hand that made it is steadier than your uncle's ever was.

At dusk you trim the wick and watch the beam sweep out across the shoal. Somewhere beyond it, a lantern bobs toward the rocks, and you find yourself counting the strokes it makes, one for each name you have not yet been asked to write.