Traditional-style tattoo on a forearm of a skull above crossed bones, a compass and set square, a pyramid with an eye, laurel branches and stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, compass and pyramid on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded skull sits above crossed bones, with a compass and set square below and a pyramid containing an eye at the base, flanked by laurel branches. The skull is shaded in black and grey with reddish tones, while the compass and eye carry orange and yellow accents. The design is arranged vertically down the forearm, with small stars and Roman numerals placed between the elements.

Traditional Forearm Skull Crossbones Compass Pyramid Eye Laurel Star Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ama Torvik came up the shaft at Quill Hollow in the seventh winter after the ice, carrying a plumb line and a grudge against whoever had built the cisterns. The water there would not run straight. It crept along the channels like a dog that had been kicked, and the elders said it went where it liked and that was the end of it.

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Above the lodge door hung a skull on an iron nail, with two bones crossed beneath it. Under those hung a brass compass and a set square on a cord, gone green at the joints. The first surveyors had kept them, and nobody now living remembered their names. Every apprentice was taught to drop the lead weight of the plumb line down the well and watch the thread. The thread hung in a dotted rule with little stars pricked along it, and that was how a person knew the true from the crooked.

Ama found the trouble in the cistern wall. The mortar had been cut from the wrong seam, and the stone leaned a finger's width towards the drain. The old men muttered that the eye in the pyramid on the lodge wall had seen it all along and said nothing. Ama laughed at them and held up the set square. Lay it on the stone, she said, and look through the gap at the bubble in the glass. Sit it in the middle and the stone is honest. It was only a sight, made for a level, and the eye was only a hole for looking through.

They tore out the leaning course and laid it again. On the last morning the skull swung gently on its nail above the water, the plumb weight hanging dead straight beneath it. The children stopped asking who had been watching them. The water ran true after that, and they called the skull Old Level, which was the nearest thing to a saint Quill Hollow had.