Black and grey realism skull tattoo with roses and scrollwork on the outer thigh, with a dangling jewelled chain below the skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded human skull sits at the centre of the design, with two roses behind it and swirling scrollwork around the top and sides. A chain with dark gem pendants hangs from the bottom of the skull. The image uses black ink and grey shading, with soft highlights on the skull and crisp linework on the petals and scrolls, and the tattoo fills most of the frame on a bare thigh above denim shorts.

Realism Neo-trad Thigh Skull Rose Scrollwork Chain Gem Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, the fourteenth. Mr Pargeter has the shutters down until noon for a funeral in Bolton, so I am left alone with the back counter, the gas turned low and the ledger open at a page I have been avoiding since Saturday. The chain came in wrapped in a handkerchief that still smelt of camphor. Seven jet beads, a drop, seven more, a drop, and at the bottom a pendant of black glass no bigger than a sloe. Mrs Haworth brought it in. She did not say whose it had been and I did not ask, because Mr Pargeter taught me that a pawnshop is a confessional with a till.

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His rule is that anything given up in grief is worth half of what the grief says it is. I weighed the chain on the brass scale and wrote eleven shillings, then struck it through and wrote six, because the clasp was bent and there was a hairline crack under the lip of the largest drop that a careful eye would find. Mrs Haworth studied the figure for a long while. Then she asked if I could keep the chain in the window with a card on it, so passers-by might see it and know it was still in the town. I said we could not. She nodded as though I had confirmed something she had already decided.

At half past five the gas man stopped at the door to ask whether the shop was open yet. I said it was not. When he had gone I took the chain out again and held it under the lamp. The glass caught the light in one small hard spot, the way the hollow of an eye socket keeps its shadow even in full day, and I thought how little of a life a single piece of jewellery is able to hold.

I have put it in the drawer marked NOT FOR SALE and laid the camphor handkerchief over it. In the ledger I have written held, not sold. Six shillings can wait.