Black and grey blackwork tattoo on the forearm of a bottle with a jagged crown top, holding a skull and a white skeletal figure.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and skeleton in a black bottle

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall bottle silhouette filled with solid black ink has a spiky crown shape at the top. Inside, a skull and a crouched skeletal figure stand out as white negative space with fine black linework. Soft dotwork stippling shades the edges of the bottle, and the design sits centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Bottle Skull Skeleton Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada counted the takings on the wagon step by lamplight, one farthing at a time, while the rain came sideways off the Bridgwater road. The tin held eleven shillings and a button. Tobias sat beside her with the bottle wrapped in a bath towel across his knees, the way his grandfather had carried it from town to town. It was the last season of the Pyle Travelling Marvels, and everyone on the field knew it except the poster on the side of the tent, which still promised the King in the Bottle to anyone with a penny.

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Nobody living had seen the inside clearly. The glass was black and thick, and the paper crown glued to the cork had gone soft and grey with handling. The showmen said a skull grinned from the neck, and that a crouched skeleton folded itself in the belly of the bottle like a man waiting for a late train. Tobias had only ever seen the shapes when the lamp hit the glass at the right angle, and he had decided long ago that the skeleton was the king's jester, kept down there for bad behaviour.

A collector from Margate offered ten pounds in a brown envelope, and Ada took it without looking at him. Tobias walked the bottle down the pier at dusk, past shuttered kiosks and a gull that followed him for two hundred yards. At the very end he pulled the cork. The air that came out smelt of tar and vinegar and something older, like a cellar after a flood. Nothing climbed out. Instead the crouched figure shifted its weight, slow as a sleeper turning over, and knocked once against the glass.

He corked it again and walked back up the pier with his hands in his pockets. At the wagon he told Ada the collector had only wanted it for a window. She didn't argue. She pushed the tin towards him, and he took out a farthing and set it on the step. Then he stood the bottle on the boards facing the dark caravans, crown uppermost, and the rain stopped, as if someone had finally remembered to close the flap.