Black and white stippled flash design of a skull over crossed bones, an all-seeing eye in a triangle, a dollar sign, a hand and a 40 oz bottle on a banner, in dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, crossbones and 40 oz bottle design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design sheet showing a skull above crossed bones, with an eye inside a triangle and a dollar sign at the top. Below the skull sits an open hand and a bottle labelled 40 oz, with a banner reading CROOKLYN across its neck. The shading is built from dense stipple dots in black ink on a white background, with no colour.

Dotwork Skull Crossbones Eye Triangle Dollar sign Hand Banner Bottle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo kept a painted triangle with an eye in it over his till, and he liked to tell anyone who would listen that the eye had never once missed a short-changed pound. Nobody believed him, which suited him fine, because the eye was really there to keep Sonny Pike honest. Sonny owed the shop forty quid in tabs chalked on the back door, and every Friday he came in with a dollar bill folded into a tight square, insisting it was money from America and therefore worth more than anything in our drawer.

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"It's a dollar, Mr O," he said, flattening it on the counter. I was sixteen and sweeping up, and I knew the joke had come off a sailor on the docks. Mr O didn't laugh. He held the note up to the bulb, then reached to the top shelf, took down a forty ounce bottle of cider and set it between them like a gravestone. Its label had gone soft at the corners from years of dust.

"Drink that, and we're square," he said. Sonny looked at the bottle, then at his own right hand, which had started to tremble the way it did when the cold came in off the river. He poured half into a chipped mug, drank none of it, and pushed the rest back across the counter. "Every drop you leave is interest," Mr O said. Sonny walked out into the rain with his palm held open at his side, as if he were carrying something he had not yet decided to give back.

The next Friday the dollar was on the counter again, ironed flat, and the bottle was empty and rinsed. Mr O put the note in the drawer under the painted eye and wrote Sonny's name off the chalk board without a word. I asked him later why he had let it go. He shrugged and said the eye only looks at what's in front of it, and Sonny had finally put something in front of it that was worth the price of a bottle.