Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with fading butterflies and handwritten script on the outer thigh.

Skull, butterflies and script on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey skull fills the lower half of the thigh, with its cracked jaw and eye socket shaded in smooth gradients and fine detail. Butterflies, some solid and some dissolving into dots, drift upward across the top of the piece, and handwritten script runs down the left side. The shading is soft and tonal against a dark background, with the patterned red shorts visible at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Lettering Thigh Skull Butterfly Script Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the skull before you learn the names of the crew. It comes up in the cod end of the third haul off Caister Bank, grey as a wet stone, wedged among the weed and the crushed plaice, and Skipper Holm lifts it out with two fingers like a man lifting a communion wafer. 'Someone's parish,' he says, and drops it in the fish box because there is nowhere else to put it.

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Through the week you keep finding things it has been carrying. A brass button. A scrap of blue ribbon knotted round a shackle. At night, when the deck lamp draws moths off the sea, you watch them settle on the box lid and lift off again, some so pale they seem to come apart before they reach the rail. Holm says the dead dislike the cold and the living dislike the dark, so the moths go between. You don't argue. You are too tired to argue.

On the Friday you find the paper. It is folded inside the jaw, softened and swollen, the ink run into a long looping hand: some of my threads and lives I have let go, the rest I'll carry until they become my own. You read it twice by the wheelhouse light and feel foolish for wanting to keep it. Holm takes it from you, reads it, and hands it back without a word.

When you land at the quay you bury the skull yourself in the churchyard above the harbour wall, under a stone with no name on it, and you keep the paper folded in your breast pocket. Every spring after, the moths come up the hill in a loose grey drift and settle along the wall, and you let them.