Traditional style tattoo of a skull pierced by a dagger, surrounded by flowers and green leaves, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and dagger on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A skull with a dagger driven through the top of its head, framed by orange and yellow flowers and dark green leaves. Bold black outlines and solid shading give the skull its form, with red and grey used for the dagger hilt and shadows. The bright colour fills the centre of the frame against pale skin, and a small partial tattoo is visible at the right edge.

Traditional Forearm Skull Dagger Flower Leaves

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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

Nobody comes for the things in the bottom drawer, so when Mr Lowther leaned on my counter at Hebden Junction one wet Tuesday and asked after his paper knife, I had to check the ledger twice. Ticket 1187, handed in on the 4.10 to Leeds in March 1961. The knife was a ridiculous thing: a cast-iron skull with a blade driven clean through its crown, the jaw picked out in red enamel that had worn to the colour of boiled sweets.

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He told me it had belonged to his father, who had bought it from the kiosk on platform two for a shilling and used it to open letters he did not want to read. Orange marigolds had been painted round its base once, and a few dark green leaves, though the paint had flaked to ghosts. He turned it over in his big hands as if checking it was still heavy enough to matter.

I wrote the collection slip while he waited, and read him the rules about signatures. He signed without reading them. Then he took a sprig of dried marigold from his coat pocket, the sort that grows wild on the embankment, and laid it on the counter where the knife had been.

When the door banged shut behind him I drew a neat line through number 1187 and left the marigold lying there, bright as a flag in the lamplight, until the evening train rattled through and shook the dust off the shelves.