Neo-trad colour tattoo of a skull in a military helmet with crossed guns and an OVERKILL banner on a forearm, shown beside its printed design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull helmet and crossed guns on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a skull wearing a military helmet, with crossed rifles, a star badge, leaves and a curled banner reading OVERKILL. Bold black outlines define the forms, with orange, green, teal and red fills and some shading on the helmet and skull. The healed tattoo sits on the left of the frame, and a printed version of the same design is held up on the right against a green background.

Neo-trad Forearm Skull Helmet Banner Star Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom Ashby found the helmet in the ditch the week the frost came, green and dented, with a skull painted on the front in a grin that had mostly worn away. He carried it home under his arm like a prize. That winter the fox had taken three of his mother's hens, and he meant to stop it.

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He fitted the helmet, buckled the strap under his chin, and took his grandfather's two rifles down from the hooks above the back door. His mother watched from the kitchen table and said nothing, which he took for consent. On the first night he sat in the henhouse doorway with the guns across his knees and the helmet pulled low, and the cold came up through the boards and stayed in his bones.

The fox came at the third hour, quiet as a thought, and went round the henhouse twice before it showed itself. Tom fired at the first sound and again at the second, and the yard filled with smoke and shouting and the din of every hen in the parish. When the smoke thinned there was no fox and no hen, only a scatter of feathers on the white ground and a red track running off past the orchard wall, unhurried.

Ruth found him at dawn asleep in the doorway, the helmet tipped over his eyes. Caught in the dented crown lay a single russet tail-tip, and nothing else. She lifted the guns off his knees and hung them back on their hooks, then set the porridge on. "The fox only wanted the hens," she said when he woke. "You wanted the whole winter." He never wore the helmet again, though it hung on the nail by the door for years. The fox came back every frost after that, and Ruth kept the wire mended.