Neo-trad style tattoo of a grey skull with pink heart eyes, pink dice, a bow and pink and black nautical stars on the top of a foot near the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, dice and nautical stars on a foot

Neo-trad · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey shaded skull with pink heart-shaped eyes, flanked by two pink dice and a black bow with small flower details. Pink and black nautical stars with smaller grey-shaded stars run up the ankle and across the top of the foot. Two side-by-side photos show the same tattoo, with soft grey shading behind the stars and the skull on a dark background.

Neo-trad Ankle Skull Dice Bow Heart Star Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Mercy Ann had been tied up below Hythe Lock since the spring floods, and you had learned to sleep through the knock of her hull against the piles. Tonight it was the dice that kept you awake. Two of them, bone white once, rattled in a tin on the galley table where Dora Quill had left them after her last hand with the lock-keeper's boy.

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Dora came aboard at dusk smelling of hops and wet coal. She tipped the tin, shook it twice, and let the dice roll out across the oilcloth. Sixes, both. "Pink luck," she said, which was what she called anything she couldn't account for, and she tapped the old skull-shaped brass fob on her chain, the one with two rose-coloured stones for eyes. Her grandfather had worn it on the Thames sugar run, and he had lost his cargo, his wife's ring and most of his teeth to the same deck of cards. She had told you that story four times, and each time the ring was worth more.

Then the stars. Dora pointed through the porthole at the bright one over the lock gates, then at the three pale ones trailing beside it, and said a sailor who could not steer by the nautical star was no sailor at all, only a gambler standing on a boat. You asked her what the difference was. She laughed and rolled a six again.

Next morning the barge was gone from its mooring, the tin left on the table with one die missing. You found it later in the cuddy, wedged under a loose board and still warm from a pocket. Sixes, both. You never did learn whether Dora had taken the luck or left it for you to carry, but you have kept the die on a red cord since, and some mornings it seems to sit a little heavier than bone.