Traditional style tattoo of a skull wearing a flat cap and bandana with a cigarette, above and below the words WORKING CLASS, on a forearm.

Skull in flat cap with cigarette

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A skull wearing a red flat cap and a red and grey patterned bandana, with a lit cigarette between its teeth and smoke lines rising beside it. The words WORKING and CLASS sit in black script above and below the skull. Bold black outlines, flat red, orange, teal and grey fills, and simple shading give it a classic traditional look.

Traditional Forearm Skull Bandana Cigarette Smoke Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flatbed gives a shudder when Harlan Pike drops the tailgate, and a cloud of grit rolls out over the crates of tinned peaches as if it has been waiting all morning to get in. He does not look up. He sits on the running board with his flat cap pushed back and rolls a cigarette with the patience of a man who has been paid for less. 'Six o'clock start,' he says. 'Desert doesn't care what time you're on the clock, son, but the foreman does.'

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You take the first crate on your shoulder and carry it to the warehouse door, where the heat comes off the concrete in sheets. Forty miles of road run straight through the scrub to the depot at Vantor, and every lorry on it carries someone else's breakfast. Harlan talks while he works, about his brother who went down the pits up north and came back with lungs like wet paper, and about a canteen in Doncaster where the tea was free and the chairs were not. You stack, he counts, the numbers come out wrong twice and right once, and nobody complains.

By noon the sun is white and the bandana knotted at your neck has gone dark with sweat. Harlan pulls a red and grey rag from his back pocket, shakes the dust out of it, and ties it over his mouth against the grit. He flicks his lighter, cups it against the wind, and the smoke goes straight up in the still air. 'Pay's pay,' he says. 'They can't take the road off us.'

That evening, with the last crate stacked, he hands you the envelope and then a cap that is too big for you. 'Keep it,' he says. 'Day you stop wearing it, you'll know you've gone soft.' You walk the forty miles home through the cooling dark with the cap tipped low, and it stays warm on your head the whole way.