Black ink pen drawing of a skull and crossbones on paper, with hatched shading in a traditional tattoo style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and crossbones pen drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn skull with crossed bones beneath it, shown on a sheet of paper with a pen resting at the top right. The skull has bold outlines, dense hatching in the eye sockets and cheekbones, and highlighted areas left blank on the cranium. The image is entirely black ink on a cream background, with no colour.

Traditional Skull Crossbones Pirate

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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 yew hedge at Coldharbour had not been cut in nine years, so when Jonah Pell took the shears to it in March he expected nests and rubbish, not the top of a skull grinning up out of the roots. Two black pits for eyes, the jaw loose, and beneath it a pair of bones laid crosswise, as if someone had meant them as a sign. He knelt in the wet grass and brushed the soil from its brow with his thumb.

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Ruth came out with the kettle still in her hand and told him to put it back and say nothing. Folk in the village said the garden had once belonged to Captain Silas Marrow, who came home from the Spanish Main with a black flag, a wooden leg and a fortune nobody ever found. Jonah did not want silver. He wanted to know who had been put in the ground under a hedge, and why someone had bothered to cross his bones.

He dug until the spade rang on iron. The box inside was no bigger than a bread tin and held no gold, only a ledger in cramped brown ink. Each page listed a rose or a pear tree, a date and a name. On the last page, in the same hand, was written: Buried by my own wish, so the garden keeps me honest. Jonah turned it over twice, looking for the joke.

He set the skull on the sill of the potting shed, facing the house. By June the bindweed had climbed the shed door and opened white flowers in the shape of crossed bones. Ruth said nothing about that. Neither did he.