Traditional style tattoo of a grey skull with orange banners reading EVERYDAY IS HALLOWEEN, a bat and a spider on a web, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Skull banner with bat and spider on back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey and black skull sits at the centre of the design, with a spiderweb draped beneath it and a black bat and spider placed to either side. Two orange banners wrap over the top and down the right side, with the words EVERYDAY IS HALLOWEEN in black lettering. The linework is bold and the skull is shaded in soft greys, while the orange and black give the composition strong contrast against the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, Nurse Adeyemi, the kettle's not boiled and the ward won't fall over while we wait. You've been counting the drip bags again. Leave them. On the late shift every night is Halloween if you let it be, so you may as well hear the one about Doreen Kell and the web on the fourth floor.

Keep reading

Doreen worked nights at Harbourside Cottage Hospital in the years when the lifts still groaned like sheep. Every October a web appeared across the lift doors, grey and perfect, spun overnight and gone by seven when Len the porter swept it into his bucket. Doreen never swept. She'd sit by the nurses' station with her tea going cold and watch the lamps in the car park, and count the bats that dipped through the light. Eleven, most years. Twelve once, which her mother said meant somebody on the ward wouldn't see Christmas.

One October Len swept the web and something rolled out from behind the lift housing, bone-white and grinning, with a crack through its crown. It was older than the hospital. Harbourside was built over a chapel nobody had bothered to move, and the skull had been waiting in the dark ever since. Doreen told Len to put it back where he'd found it. He didn't. He put it on the windowsill of the fourth floor, facing the corridor. By morning the web was back, thicker than before, and the patients who grumbled about their beds slept like children.

So tonight, when the lamps flicker, you leave whatever you find behind the lift alone. Pass me that clipboard. Mind the spider on your sleeve, it's only come to see who's on.

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