Black and grey traditional skull and crossed swords tattoo on an upper arm, just below a dark sleeve, in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and crossed swords on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold skull with empty eye sockets and a simple jaw sits above two crossed swords, forming a pirate-style emblem. The tattoo uses firm black outlines with light grey shading on the skull and blades. The black and white photograph is shot close up, with a dark sleeve at the top of the frame and a blurred background.

Traditional Upper arm Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the ninth floor of Halcombe House could say who first drew the skull on the lift doors, only that it was done in black marker and was better drawn than anything the council had ever pinned up. The lift had been out since March. Mr Adeyemi said the sea had got into the shaft. The children, who had never seen the sea, agreed with him, because a lift with a pirate on its doors was more interesting than one without.

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The story going round was that the skull belonged to a girl called Fen, who lived on the fourteenth floor and kept her grandfather's swords in a biscuit tin under her bed. He had sailed out of Bristol before the war and never said much about it. When she finally took the tin up to the roof on a blustery evening, she found the swords were only two kitchen knives wrapped in oilcloth, bent and speckled with rust. She laughed until she had to sit down on the gravel, and then she went back down the stairs and drew the skull herself, with the eye holes left empty so nobody could say whose face it was.

After that the lift stayed broken. Nobody complained to the council, because the council had never once come to Halcombe House without being asked twice. Instead the children climbed the stairs in a crowd, chanting the rhyme their grandmothers had taught them, and at the top of each landing someone had pinned a strip of white sheet to the railings, painted with a grinning skull and two crossed blades, snapping in the wind above the car park.

On the first morning of spring the lift doors opened by themselves on the ninth floor. There was nobody inside, only a smell of salt and a biscuit tin lid lying on the floor, rusted through, with a single bent knife resting in it.