Colour forearm tattoo of a skull beside a woman with teal hair and red bows, with the typewriter-style quote 'And I know these dreams will be the death of me' above.

Skull and woman with quote on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skull in a dark hooded headdress with red flowers sits beside a pale woman with teal hair in an updo and a red bow, shown in profile with bare shoulders and corset-style lacing. The linework is dark and sketchy, with soft colour washes in red, teal and skin tones, and the quote is set in a typewriter font above the figures. The design fills a vertical strip of the forearm, with the text placed along the top edge.

Neo-trad Forearm Skull Woman Bow Flower Corset Quote Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teal taffeta had come up from Manchester on the Tuesday train, and Ida Pryce had the pattern pinned before the shop bell stopped swinging. Mrs Garrow wanted it for the Whit dance at the Assembly Rooms. She came in every Thursday in her widow's black, a jet skull pinned at her throat, and every Thursday she asked the same question about the boning, as though the answer might change.

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The girl who came to fit the bodice was called Nell, seventeen, from the farm past the chapel, with hair she twisted up in a hurry and a laugh she kept folded away like a handkerchief. Ida laced her into the corset while Mrs Garrow sat by the window with a cup going cold. "You'll be the one they're all talking about," the widow said. Nell pulled the red bow at her hip tight and said nothing, because two of the Hartley boys had already asked her to dance in a single week, and her mother had started counting the dances out loud.

Before she left, Mrs Garrow tapped out something on the shop's old Imperial typewriter, the one Ida kept for invoices, and left the slip face down on the counter. Four lines, the letters struck hard enough to dent the card. Ida read it twice and understood that the widow had been talking about herself the whole time, and that the skull at her throat had never been meant as a joke.

On Saturday night the band played too fast and the floor shook under the boards. Nell turned past the pillars in teal taffeta with her bow coming loose, and Ida stood at the back with the slip folded in her apron pocket, watching the girl dance as if the floor might give way at any moment and she meant to be in the air when it did.