Black and grey traditional tattoo of a shaded skull and crossed swords within a flame-like black shape on the upper arm.

Skull and crossed swords on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded skull with crossed swords sits centrally within a jagged, flame-like black shape that bleeds out to the edges of the design. The skull and blades are rendered in soft greys with highlights, while the surrounding black has a textured, lightly speckled finish. The photograph is taken at an angle on a sofa, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the wind off the Solway has teeth tonight and this castle has never once kept it out. Aye, that's the stair Captain Ruth Gallagher climbed the night she came ashore with a black flag rolled under her coat. The keep was already a ruin then, roof gone, walls scorched from some siege nobody remembers the reason for.

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She'd sailed the Mary Sorrow with eleven hands, and the flag she flew was no plain thing. Her sailmaker had stitched it from an old shroud and a burnt sail, and then Ruth had set the edges alight herself so the cloth would look like it had risen up out of the sea. Smoke-black it was, with tongues of it licking up towards the top corner. In the middle sat a grinning skull, pale as a dinner plate, and beneath it two blades crossed like a pair of sharp opinions.

The harbour magistrate in Kirkcudbright had put a purse on her head, and she knew it. So she came up here, where the gulls nest in the arrow slits, and sat on the cold stone to wait for the only man who had ever beaten her at cards. He climbed the stair at midnight with a lantern and a face like a wet Sunday.

"You've brought the flag," he said.

"I have," said Ruth. "Burn it or bury it, Tam. The choice is yours, and mind you choose right."

He looked at that skull a long time. Then he laughed, and the old walls rang with it, and that was the last anyone heard of Ruth Gallagher, though the flag was seen flying from the mast of a sloop called the Quiet Wife for seven years after.