Grey stencil design of a skull and crossbones on a waving pirate flag, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and crossbones pirate flag stencil

Black and grey · Flash

A stencilled design of a skull above two crossed bones, set on a flag that billows out to the right and is attached to a pole on the left. The solid skull and bones are rendered as pale negative shapes against a grey, stippled background with soft, speckled edges. The image is black and grey, centred on the design, with no skin or body part visible.

Skull Crossbones Flag Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo had the card cut by twelve, the flag's curl trimmed with a craft knife he'd sharpened on the back step. The skull sat in the middle of the sheet like a coin pressed into wax. Across the canal the lights on the rail bridge blinked off one by one, and somewhere a bus knelt at its stop with a long sigh of brakes.

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Dev held the torch and the chips, which he had no intention of sharing. "Keep it flat," he said, as Mo pressed the card to the shutter of the closed launderette and clamped the corners with masking tape. She shook the can until the ball rattled like a dropped tooth. The first pass came out grey and speckled, the bones crossing beneath the skull in pale shapes where the card had held firm. Nobody on the kerb looked twice. A flag on a launderette was the sort of thing the city stopped seeing by Tuesday.

Headlights swung round the corner, slow and yellow. Dev dropped into the doorway of the bookies and pulled Mo in after him, the can cold against her palm. The van rolled past without stopping, its radio murmuring about a lorry on the ring road. When the street was empty again Dev was laughing too hard to talk, and Mo was already peeling the tape back from the edges.

The card came away clean. The skull held its shape, and the tail of the flag stayed sharp where the spray had feathered out, not a single drip. Off the canal a damp breath rolled up between the parked cars and drifted over the shutter, lifting the grey mist so the whole flag seemed to shift, as if it had caught a wind the rest of the street could not feel.