Black and grey engraved tattoo of a skull fused with a gramophone horn and spine on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and gramophone horn on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits inside a gramophone-style body, with a flared horn rising above it and a vertebral column trailing down below. The design is drawn in fine black hatching and cross-hatched shading that gives the skull and horn a rounded, engraved appearance. It is rendered entirely in greyscale against pale skin, with a blurred indoor background at the edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stair, it turns where the wall gave way in my grandmother's time, and the steps are worn to a dish in the middle. Up here the wind comes through the arrow slits and plays the old horn of the keep like a man with a cold. You hear it? That is no ghost. That is Osric's gramophone, and his skull is still in the works, grinning at the moat.

Keep reading

He was a wireless man from Hexham who came up the valley with a case of records and a head full of brass. The lord of the castle wanted his hall to sing after dark, so Osric wound the great black box and set the horn to the sky. The music went out over the bailey, over the sheep, down into the village where the bells had been silent since the flood. People came for the dancing. Nobody came back out of the hall on the seventh night, and the records kept turning.

What was left of Osric was found in the crank cupboard, a skull fitted neatly into the cabinet, his spine threaded down through the bellows like a cable. The lord laughed until he cried and ordered it mended. So they hung it on the wall, and every evening the horn still lifts itself a finger's width toward the moon.

The village children dare each other to climb up and wind the handle. Last autumn my own boy did it, and the record played his mother's name in a voice I had not heard since I was small. He is grown now and gone south to the cities. I keep the crank oiled, though. A tune like that is owed back, one way or another.

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