Shirtless man with a realistic black and grey skull and red sunburst tattoo across his chest and stomach, with geometric linework and red and grey sleeves on both arms.

Skull and geometric full torso and sleeve tattoo

Realism · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A shirtless man, cropped below the beard, shows a large tattoo covering his chest, stomach and both arms. A shaded grey skull sits centrally over the abdomen, with a red sunburst behind a small red and black circular motif above it, and fine geometric linework across the upper chest and shoulders. Both sleeves combine grey shading with red splashes, skulls and short lettering, and the colour is concentrated in the red accents against the greys.

Realism Geometric Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Other Skull Sunburst Geometric pattern Lettering Sleeve Torso Abstract

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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

The skull had sat on the cartographer's desk since Tuesday, and Ilse Marrow had stopped pretending she did not look at it while she inked the eastern coast. The miners had brought it up from the salt workings wrapped in oilcloth, grey as wet ash, its jaw bound with copper wire by someone who had cared about it. Nobody in the Kingdom of Hesk-Varrow could say whose it was. The Royal Surveyor, Oswin Trell, wanted only the chart finished before the feast of the red sun.

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She had drawn the grid herself, a lattice of fine hexagons that bent around the headland like a net pulled tight. On the skull's brow the same lattice had been cut into the bone, so faint she thought at first it was a flaw in the lamplight. When she pressed the chart flat with its edge, a thin line of madder had seeped from the cheekbone where someone had painted it long ago. It ran south-east, straight across her coastline, toward the spot Trell had marked with a red circle and a note that read: no survey here.

She laid the skull over the sunburst he had asked her to copy, so the eye sockets fell on the rays and the wired jaw pointed at the flats. The lines she had drawn that morning shivered and rearranged themselves, and where the old border had run, the salt crept back into the grid. By dusk the chart showed a shoreline that had not existed on any map in the kingdom. Trell came in with his lamp, looked at it for a long time, and said nothing. Ilse took a clean pen and began to draw the new coast in, one red hexagon at a time.