Three views of a black and grey skull tattoo with red splashes and lines of text on an upper arm sleeve.

Skull and red splashes on upper arm sleeve

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic skull fills most of the upper arm, with heavy black shading, grey highlights and loose, painterly black strokes sweeping across it. Splashes of red ink run through the design and around the shoulder, and a block of small typed-style words wraps down the lower part of the arm. The three photographs show the same sleeve from front, side and back against a black background.

Upper arm Skull Text Brushstroke Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The type was locked up backwards, which was the first thing wrong with it. Eddie Mollison held the galley up to the bulb above the stone and read the lines in reverse, the way you learn to in a composing room before you learn anything useful. Ways to lose a town. Everything you will. Upside down, the words kept climbing toward the top of the page like something trying to get out of the wet ink.

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Eddie had set the Sunday supplement at Carrick and Pym for twenty-two years and nobody had ever asked him for a skull. The copy had come in on a dictation slip in a hand he didn't know, and the drawing pinned to it showed a skull half buried in black, smeared like a plate wiped with a sleeve, a red spill running down one side as if the press had bled. He had sent it down to the foundry the same night.

The foreman, old Dolan, came down the iron stairs with his cap on backwards and said the Thursday edition would not run with that thing on the front. Eddie said it had been ordered. Dolan asked ordered by whom. Eddie didn't know. He only knew the slip had been left under the lamp, and that every letter in the caption was one he had already locked up somewhere years back and forgotten.

They ran it anyway. At six the presses turned over, and the first copy off the top of the stack was clean except for one column, where the words read the right way round for the first time: you will, you will, and then nothing, a white gap the exact width of a skull. Dolan kept that copy in his desk drawer until he died. Eddie never told him he had set the gap himself, one blank line at a time, because the type had asked him to.