Black ink drawing of a skull inside an ornate scrolled frame, a design suited to a neo-traditional style tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in an ornate baroque frame

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A human skull in three-quarter view sits inside a circular inner border, surrounded by a heavily scrolled, baroque-style ornamental frame with rosettes at the top and bottom. The linework is bold and even, with cross-hatched shading on the skull and fine detail in the scrolls and cracks. The drawing is in black ink on a pale paper background, and the symmetrical composition is centred on the skull.

Neo-trad Skull Frame Ornament Scroll Rosette Crack

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning by eleven, so I stopped pretending the stall was dry and started pricing the wet things instead. Most of the morning had gone on mirrors. People in Saturday coats bring their mothers' frames and ask whether they're worth anything, and nine times in ten the answer is a kind lie about the gilt.

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The woman who came round the corner at half past eleven was carrying one of those frames flat against her chest, like a tray. It was a baroque thing, heavy with scrolls and rosettes, and inside the circle of it was an old engraving of a skull in three-quarter view. A crack ran across the glass and right through the brow, so the skull seemed to be looking out from behind a frozen puddle. She didn't want it restored. She wanted it gone, she said, and she wanted it gone to someone who would not cry about it.

I offered twelve pounds. She laughed and said her father had paid four times that in 1979, and that he had told her the crack was there when he bought it. He used to say the skull was the only honest face in the house, because it had nothing left to hide. Then she took the twelve pounds anyway, folded it twice, and walked off into the wet without looking back.

I wrapped the frame in a page of the local paper and set it on the shelf by the till. The water ran down the outside of the glass in thin lines, and through the crack the skull kept its grin at the empty market, as if it had seen every sale I'd ever make and thought none of them worth the trouble.