Monochrome drawing of a woman whose face is half skull, with a long side braid, a bow at the collar and a lace-trimmed blouse, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull-faced woman with braid and bow

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a woman with the lower half of her face rendered as a skull, grinning with visible teeth. Her hair is swept up at the top and falls into a long braid over one shoulder, and she wears a dark bow above a ruffled, button-fronted blouse with lace trim. The shading is fine and pencil-like in black and grey on a pale cream background.

Realism Skull Woman Portrait Braid Bow Lace Hair

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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

Mrs Abernethy had kept the linen at Thornacre for thirty-one years and knew the voice of every drawer in the house. So when the new governess came down the back stairs one February morning, her plait swinging over one shoulder like a bell rope, Mrs Abernethy noticed that the girl made no sound at all on the treads.

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Miss Pell had arrived with two trunks, a letter of character from a vicar in Whitby, and a black silk bow she retied each morning before the glass. She taught the Hallam children their letters and their sums and never once raised her voice. The children adored her. They said she could name every bird in the wood before it sang, and that she smiled with all her teeth when a sum came out right.

Mrs Abernethy kept her counsel until the night the mill bell rang across the valley for a child lost in the bracken. Her lamp found the schoolroom door ajar. Miss Pell stood at the window, buttoned to the throat, counting under her breath in a voice that was not quite hers. Thirty-one, she said. Thirty-one. When she turned, the lamplight caught the grin, and the housekeeper understood that the girl had been counting something other than sums.

Mrs Abernethy did not scream. She had folded linen long enough to know that some things are only put right by doing them neatly. In the morning the schoolroom was empty, the black bow lay folded on the desk, and beside it sat a slate covered in figures, every one correct. The lost child was found at noon, asleep in the bracken, with a black silk ribbon knotted loosely at her throat.