Traditional style colour tattoo of a grinning skull wearing a tan cowboy hat and striped green and yellow bandana, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in cowboy hat on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grinning skull wearing a tan cowboy hat and a striped green, yellow and teal bandana, with red and yellow accents on its eyes and teeth. Bold black outlines define the skull and hat, with flat colour fills and soft shading on the hat brim. The design is centred on the forearm against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Sweetwater Wash runs straight for nine miles and then forgets where it was going, and that was where Ada Breck found the skull sitting on a fence post with its tan hat tipped down against the sun. Its bandana was striped green and yellow and teal, the colours of the bunting her father had strung along the wagon the morning they left the river, and she knew it by that before she knew anything else.

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"Water," said the skull, though its jaw did not move the way a jaw should. Its eyes were rimmed in red and one of them looked past her shoulder at the hills. "You've got a canteen. I can smell the cork from here."

She gave it the canteen because her mother had taught her that the dead are owed courtesy and the living are owed sense. The skull did not drink. It tipped the canteen over its own crown and let the water run out through the eyeholes and down the back of the hat, and it laughed the way a rusted gate laughs when someone finally opens it. "Dry Hollow well," it said. "A man in a black coat stopped it up with a stone the size of a church. I want that stone moved, and I can't move it, because I owe him a hand of cards and I lost."

Ada sat down on the cracked earth, because it seemed the only polite thing to do. She told the skull the joke her father had always told when the oxen balked, about the preacher, the mule and the bishop's wife. The skull did not get it at first. Then it did, and it laughed so hard the hat slid off its head and rolled into the dust, and when Ada went to fetch it she found the stone at Dry Hollow rolled clean aside and the water sitting bright and cold in the hollow beneath.

She filled the canteen, drank first, and came back for the hat. The skull was gone from the post, but the bandana was knotted round the wood where it had been, bright as the day her father hung it, and she left the hat there on top of it for whoever came next to need shade.

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