Colour tattoo of a shaded skull with a gear over one eye, two crows and red lilies on an upper arm, set against red and black ink splashes.

Skull, crows and lilies on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey skull with a small metal gear over its eye sits at the centre of the design, with red lilies on its right side and two black crows in flight above. Smooth shading gives the skull and birds depth, while loose brush strokes and red and black splashes form a painterly background. Red dominates the colour palette with black and grey throughout, and the piece wraps the outer upper arm.

Realism Upper arm Skull Gear Crow Raven Lily Flower Splash Bird

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that board's been loose since the Coronation and nobody's paid to fix it. Right, you want the one about Mr Ambrose Fell and his clock-eyed skull? Sit down, then.

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Fell kept the orchestrion at the Palais de Lune on the pier at Morecambe, a great walnut thing with pipes like organ tubes and a painted mermaid on its front. Every Saturday that summer of 1953 the crows came down off the terrace roofs and sat along the balustrade, watching the couples through the glass. Nobody thought much of it. Crows like music, Fell said, same as the rest of us.

The skull came in a tea chest from a dealer in Lancaster. Fell fitted a brass gear where the left eye should have been, and when he wound the orchestrion the gear turned, slow as a tide, and the jaw clicked along to the waltz. He tucked orange lilies into its cheekbones for the girls who asked. The dancers loved it. Only the old drummer, Teddy Varley, would never look at it straight, and he'd lost two fingers in a mangle, so he had his reasons.

On the last night of the season the power failed mid-foxtrot, the hall went black, and when the lamps came back the gear was spinning backwards and every crow on the balustrade had gone. Fell was found at dawn on the sand, dry as a bone, with a red smear across his shirt like a paintbrush had been dragged through it. The skull sat on the orchestrion, wound down, grinning. Varley took it home that night and never once let it hear a waltz again.