Back view of a person with a large greyscale skull tattoo across the back, portrait tattoos down the thighs and a sleeve on the arm, wearing a purple thong.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and portrait back and leg tattoos in greyscale

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A rear view of a person covered in black and grey tattoos, with a large realistic skull dominating the back and smoky clouds around it. Two detailed portrait tattoos of women run down the thighs, one with tears falling from the eye, and the arm carries further shaded ornament. The shading is smooth and high contrast against a dark patterned wallpaper background.

Realism Back Thigh Upper arm Forearm Skull Portrait Woman Tear Smoke Cloud Ornament Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third plate had gone grey at the edges again, and Mrs Ashdown would not pay for a face she could not recognise. I wiped the glass with my cuff, held it to the window of the back room on Lant Street, and tried not to breathe the lamp smoke across it. Mr Corrigan had taught me that the trick was to let the smoke do the work. Smoke hides the stand, the chair and the cheap rope that holds a head steady, and what is left is a man who has only fallen asleep.

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I had learned to paint over the rest. With a sable brush no thicker than a hair, I added the shading under the cheekbones he had lost in the last week, and then, because Mrs Ashdown had asked for it, a single bead of water on the left eye. She said her husband had cried at their wedding and she wanted the picture to remember it. I did not argue. Mr Corrigan had been dead eleven years, yet his wallpaper still climbed the stairs in ink-black damask, the same leaves and lilies, and I had stopped seeing them.

When the widow had gone, I opened the cabinet where the older plates waited, each in its card sleeve. The oldest showed a woman with a skull set on the table beside her, smoke rising from a candle at her elbow, the tears on her face so carefully shaded they looked wet. Her name was written on the back in Mr Corrigan's hand: Eliza, aged nine. I had never asked who she was to him, and I did not want to ask now. I turned the card face down, struck a fresh match and lit the lamp for the next sitter, leaving the smoke to do its work.