Black and grey circular flash design of an apple with a skull face and a blackletter quote around the ring, with no placement on the body shown.

Skull apple badge with blackletter quote

Black and grey · Flash

A dark charcoal apple with a skull-shaped face and a small stem and bow sits at the centre of a circular badge on an off-white background. Blackletter lettering runs around a dark outer ring, and a small silhouette sits at the top of the ring. The solid black fills and clean outlines give the design a bold, graphic look in a single tone.

Apple Skull Blackletter Quote Badge Bow Circle

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apple is cold from the cellar under the Institute, and its skin has a dull shine, like coal dust rubbed into wet cloth. Mam says the last tree in the Pennick orchard was felled for pit props the winter before the strike, so nobody should be selling Pennick fruit at the Saturday market. Yet there it sits on the stall between the cabbages and the pickled eggs, with a faded red ribbon tied to its stalk in a neat little bow. You pay the woman a penny and she doesn't look up.

Keep reading

Ellis is waiting by the lamp-room door when you come out, his cap pushed back and his face already grinning. The whistle has gone and the men are walking up the row in their black, boots loud on the setts. He says the fairground man who came through Abertillery swore one bite makes every wish you've buried come true. You think of the list folded inside your Bible: boots that fit, a window with a view of the sea, your father's hands unbroken. You tell him you're not daft enough to believe it.

Then the cage bell rings for the night shift, two sharp notes that carry right down the valley, and you find you have already taken the bite. It is sweet first, then sour, then tastes of iron, the way the water in the top level tastes when the pumps have run too long. Ellis laughs and claps your shoulder.

Down at the pit head the wheel begins to turn, and the cage rattles away into the dark with every man on the row inside it, all of them wishing, all of them quiet.