Traditional colour tattoo of a shaded skull over crossed bones and a red shield, with script reading In My Darkest Hour, on the upper back.

Skull and crossed bones with script on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A shaded skull wearing a pair of goggles sits over crossed bones and a red shield-shaped banner, with swirling script reading In My Darkest Hour arched above and around it. The skull uses tan and grey shading with fine black outlines, while the bones and banner are filled in with bold red. The design is centred on a pale area of skin, with the upper back and shoulder blade filling most of the frame.

Traditional Back Skull Shield Banner Script Goggles

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, that's the flour sack, and don't touch the peel while it's hot. Sit you there by the ovens where the bricks hold their heat. Old Ferris sat in that same spot every morning for forty years, and he'd tell you what I'm telling you: the dark hour is the one that matters, not the light.

Keep reading

Ferris kept a grinning skull on the shelf above the proving tins. A lad from the docks had given it to him for a debt, with two crossed bones painted on a red board behind it. He wore a pair of brass goggles to draw the loaves from the oven mouth, because the glare would take the lashes off your eyes otherwise. Nobody in Hartley Lane thought it odd. They thought it was simply the baker being baker.

One February the mill at the top of the lane burned, and there was no flour for three days. Ferris sat up in the dark with the banked fire throwing red light through the oven door, and he decided he would bake anyway, from the last sack of rye he'd hidden under the stairs. He mixed it by lamplight, humming the wrong verses of a hymn, and when the first loaves came out black at the edges and sour as vinegar, he wrapped one in paper and carried it down the lane to the Pollards' door before the sun was up.

Mrs Pollard told me she ate that loaf with the night still pressed against her windows and said it was the best bread of her life. Ferris never explained the words he'd scratched under the skull, the ones about the darkest hour. He only said that was the one time a man could tell what bread was really for. Now shift yourself, the second batch is ready.