Black and grey skull tattoo across the back of a shirtless man, with arm tattoos including a Star of David on the right arm.

Skull back tattoo with arm sleeves

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man stands barefoot with his back to the camera, showing a large skull tattoo filling most of his upper back, framed by ornate patterned panels. The skull is rendered in black and grey with shaded tones and detailed linework, and tattoos continue down both arms. The composition is a full-length shot in a stone corridor with a pale wooden floor.

Back Upper arm Forearm Skull Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull over the arch at Hollin Moor had been watching the platform since 1887, and the stationmaster's daughter swore it blinked whenever the last up train pulled in. I had been sent to cover the night porter that winter, a job nobody else wanted, and the first thing I learned was to keep the lamp trimmed low so the carved face stayed in shadow.

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The trouble came on a night of sleet, when a woman in a grey coat stepped off the nine-forty without a ticket and asked for the stationmaster by a name that had been dead thirty years. She carried a canvas bag that clicked as she walked, the way bones do in a box. I told her the office was shut. She looked up at the iron scrollwork curling around the clock, like smoke caught in a frame, and said the company had always kept its dead on the platform side, where they could watch the trains go out.

I checked the ledger, which I had no business doing, and found the name written in my own hand, dated tomorrow. I had not written it yet. Ada's voice drifted down the stairwell, asking whether I had seen her father's pocket watch, and the clock behind me stopped at twelve with a sound like a jaw dropping.

I gave the woman my watch and the last ticket in the drawer. She tipped her hat, walked onto the nine-forty that was not due, and the skull above the arch grinned down at me with its black sockets, very pleased with the arrangement. By morning the ledger had a new line in it, and the hand was mine.