Black linework skull tattoo on a forearm, with red outlined flowers, a grey-shaded eye socket and grey shading on the teeth.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and red flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skull outline in black ink sits across the forearm, with a grey-shaded eye socket, a triangular nose and vertical grey-shaded teeth lines. Two red-outlined flowers with leaf-like petals sit beside the skull, one in the eye area and one on the side. The bold black linework is contrasted with soft grey shading on a plain, lightly lit background.

Traditional Forearm Skull Flower Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove and pour the tea, the big pot, mind the lid. You'll have seen the rock off the point at low water, the one the charts call Gannet Head but my grandmother always called the Skull. Two eye holes, a gap for a nose, a row of teeth where the surf goes in and out. Nobody lands on it. Nobody needs to.

Keep reading

Here's what they tell about the keeper's wife, Nell Harrow, who came out to the light in 1911 with a trunk of seed packets and no sense at all. The island had no soil to speak of, only salt and gull muck, and the men laughed when she scattered red poppies in the lee of the wall. Thirty days later they came up through the cracks in pairs, red as a lamp, with leaves spread like the fingers of a hand held up to be counted.

Every spring she walked the path to the Skull at dead low water with a trowel and a jar of fresh water, and she set one more flower in the socket where the sea had scoured the rock hollow. Her husband Tom thought it morbid. She said the sea had taken the eyes out of that rock and somebody ought to give it back a bit of colour.

The winter the Ellen Marr came onto the reef in fog, the lamp was out for want of oil, and it was young Davy Pike who ran the wet path to the Skull and saw red in the dark. He swears the poppies were lit. I've never told him he's wrong, and I've never told him he's right.