Black and grey traditional tattoo of a skull inside a large toothed mouth on the upper arm, just above the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in a toothed mouth on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold skull sits inside a large open mouth with rows of upper and lower teeth, all enclosed in a solid black rounded shape. The linework is thick and clean, with white highlights left in the skull and teeth and black fill used for the outline and surround. The design is shown in close view on an upper arm above the elbow, with a plain shop window and door behind it.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Teeth Mouth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last fair in the valley had one attraction left that still drew a crowd, and that was the Mouth. Old Harrow Pell had painted it on a canvas flap the size of a barn door: two rows of teeth, lips rolled back, black as a chimney. Children paid a penny to walk through it. Nobody asked what lay on the far side, because the far side was only the back of the tent and a bucket of sawdust.

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Each autumn the fair grew smaller. The lion went first, then the carousel horses, sold for firewood to a farmer near Tiverton. Pell kept the Mouth. Every evening he sat under it with a tin of shag and a pot of paint, touching up the gums, because his mother had told him a fair was only as honest as its doorway.

One wet October a girl called Nell Tarrant, the farrier's daughter, came up the lane with a brass button in her fist. She had no penny. Pell said a button would do if she meant it. She walked in. He waited, and when she came out the other side her hair was dry, though it had rained all afternoon, and she was carrying a small white skull on her palm. She said the teeth had been shut around it for years, and that it had only wanted someone to look.

In the morning the wagons were gone and the field was grey with frost. The Mouth hung between two poles with nothing behind it, and where the skull had grinned out from the black of the throat, there was a single white bone pressed into the mud, looking up at the empty lane.