Black and white flash drawing of a skull wearing a peaked cap, with the lower face covered by a bandana printed with the American flag.

Skull in cap with American flag bandana

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white skull design wears a peaked cap, and its lower face is covered by a bandana patterned with the American flag. The stars are picked out in white on a black field, and the stripes are solid bands with thick outlines. The design sits centred on a plain white background with almost no shading.

Skull Cap Bandana American flag Star Stripe

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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

Dennis wanted the stars done properly, so I spent Tuesday night at the cutting bench with a number eleven blade and a magnifier clipped to my glasses. The skull was easy. Skulls always are, because the bone sits where you put it. It was the bandana that kept me up, a flag folded over the jaw as though someone had tied it on in a hurry, and forty-nine little stars that had to hold their shape when the film was lifted off the backing card.

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Stencil film is unforgiving. Every star is an island, and an island with no bridge to the rest of the sheet simply comes away on the weeding tool and goes in the bin. I lost six before I worked out the trick, which was to leave the stripes a fraction fatter than the drawing and let the stars sit in the gaps like coins in a tray. Dennis came by on Wednesday with a flask and watched me lift a single star off the bench with the tip of the blade, the way my mother used to pick splinters out of our palms.

He asked whether the stencil would keep. I said a good one would last a few hundred pulls, longer if he didn't press so hard. He nodded at the skull and said his brother had worn the same peaked cap, pulled low, right up until the week he didn't. I did not ask which week. I handed him the finished sheet, and he held it up to the strip light so the stars showed white as frost, and for a moment the whole design looked like a window onto a night sky, all of it holes.