Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a skull with a spider's body and fangs, with black legs and yellow drips, on the outer thigh.

Skull and spider hybrid on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A skull with fanged teeth forms the head of a black spider with long legs and red eyes, with a small red symbol on the forehead. Bold black outlines and soft grey shading give the skull and legs depth, while orange, yellow and red fill the skull and drips below it. The design fills the upper leg vertically, with the knee visible at the bottom of the frame.

Neo-trad Thigh Skull Spider Fangs Teeth Leg Drip Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mayfair Palais closed at eleven, but nobody had told the bass player, who kept sawing at a slow foxtrot after the house lights dropped. You were stacking chairs by the cloakroom with your hair pinned up and your feet aching, and you noticed the spider before you noticed the man it belonged to: a long black thing crossing the maple boards, legs stretched out like the tines of a fork, sliding toward the bandstand.

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Mr Cadogan had come every Thursday since spring, always in a grey suit that smelled of camphor, always asking Dolores at the ticket window for a dance with the girl who never smiles. He never danced with anyone else. Tonight he sat on the piano bench under the mirror ball, and when he turned his face was a skull with a red stain above the brow where the ticket stamp had been pressed. Its jaw clicked. The teeth were yellow as tallow candles, and the wall sconces threw their light down the plaster in thin streaks, the way paraffin runs off a cooling wick.

'You owe me a waltz,' the skull said, in the bass player's voice, though the bass player had stopped playing and was standing very still by the fire door. Your mother taught you never to dance with a man who keeps his hat on. You looked for the hat. There was no hat. There were only the legs, folding and unfolding, patient as a clockmaker's hands.

So you took the dance. Eight steps, the spider counted them with a soft tick on the boards, and it held you the way a careful partner holds a tray of full glasses. When the record ran out you were alone under the mirror ball. The next morning the cleaner found long scratches across the dance floor in three-four time, and on the cloakroom ledge a dance card with your name written in small red dots.