Black and grey back tattoo of a skull breaking through cracked stone blocks, shown on a man lying face down on a white treatment table.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and fragmented stone back piece

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a skull partly emerging from fragmented, cracked blocks, with a second rounded form and a sharp angular shape on the left. The work uses smooth grey shading, strong contrast and crisp highlights to give the forms depth. The composition fills the upper and middle back, with the subject lying face down on a white table in a studio.

Realism Back Skull Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last week of the Halloran season, the big top sagged in the rain like a wet sail, and the lion had already been sold to a zoo in Leeds. I painted the lettering on the wagons, so when Mr Halloran asked me to fix the ring I went looking behind the generator for something to stand on. There were six blocks of stone left from the Corn Exchange facade, the ones the council had let us haul off for nothing, cracked clean through as if someone had tried to split them with a look.

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I spent three nights with a cold chisel and a borrowed lamp. The first block split along a seam I hadn't expected, and inside it a grey hollow brow pushed up out of the rubble the way a drowned man comes up through river weed. Nobody asked me to do it. Dunmore, who had been the clown since before I was born, sat on an upturned crate and watched with his greasepaint half off, and said the stone had only been waiting to be let out of its own mess.

On the final night we set the blocks in a half-ring under the lights, the carved skull at the centre, its jaw cocked toward the empty seats. Forty people came, which was more than we had all summer. Halloran stood at the back with his hat in both hands and said nothing when the cracks caught the spotlight and the face seemed to shift its weight.

We struck the tent at dawn. The blocks stayed where we left them, in the wet grass by the gate, and when I drove past a month later the grass had grown up round them and the skull was still grinning at the road, as if it had been the one who finally got to watch the show.