Black and grey realistic tattoo of a skull wearing a star-studded cowboy hat, shown on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in a cowboy hat with stars on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A grinning skull wears a cowboy hat decorated with five-pointed stars, with the brim sweeping across the top of the design. The skull and hat are shaded in black and grey with smooth gradients, strong highlights on the bone and hat, and deep shadows in the eye sockets and teeth. The design fills the frame, with the skull large and centred and the hat cropped at the top edge.

Realism Upper arm Skull Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The evening freight was three days late when the stranger stepped down onto the platform at Pardon Junction, his hat brim cutting a clean line through the lamplight. Five silver stars ran around the crown, and they glinted as if someone had pinned a piece of the night sky to him. I was the telegraph operator, so I was the only one who looked long enough to see what sat beneath the brim, and I wished I had not. Where a face ought to have been there was only a grin, all teeth and hollow shadow, and it turned towards me with a patience that made the lamp hiss.

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"Wire the Chief Dispatcher at Hollow Creek," he said, and his voice came through the gap of his jaw like wind through a broken window. "Tell him the debts are settled. Tell him the Ellery boys have been paid in full." I tapped it out with a shaking hand: ALL DEBTS SETTLED STOP ELLERY ACCOUNT CLOSED STOP. The sounder clicked back almost at once, which was strange, because the Hollow Creek line had been washed out by a flood since spring. The reply came slow and careful: RECEIVED STOP WHO SENT THIS STOP.

When I looked up the platform was empty. The stranger had walked off into the dust without a sound, and the only mark he had left was a single silver star lying on the windowsill beside my key. I held it up to the lamp. Engraved on its back, in letters so fine I had to squint, were the names of six men who had ridden out of Hollow Creek years before and never come back.

The wire clicked again before dawn. I did not answer it. I only pinned the star above the sounder, where I could see it while I worked, and every night since, the freight has arrived on time and the sounder ticks a little after midnight, polite as a clerk, asking for one more name.