Realistic colour tattoo on a lower leg of a skull wearing a green beret with a badge, set over crossed daggers, red and yellow lightning bolts and a bullet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in green beret with crossed daggers on calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A shaded skull wearing a green beret with a small badge sits at the centre, with a bullet above and two crossed daggers beneath it. Red and yellow lightning bolts run down the lower half, and a dark cord curls at the bottom edge. The skull is rendered in grey and brown tones with soft shading, while the beret and lightning add saturated green, red and yellow.

Realism Calf Skull Dagger Lightning bolt Badge

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mast on Crow Hill took its first lightning strike the week the new lads arrived, and by the Thursday the wireless hut smelled of scorched solder and wet wool. Sergeant Matthews swore the bolt had been aimed at our tin roof, and that the skull on the shelf was the reason. Nobody knew where the skull had come from. It had turned up in a flooded trench we used as a store, bone-white and grinning, and someone had hung a green beret on it from a dead man's kit. Nobody admitted to that either.

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Matthews kept two daggers crossed above the door, lashed with fuse wire, and each morning he tapped the spent bullet pinned beside them for luck before he switched the set on. The signals that autumn came in pieces: half a grid reference, a farm name drowned in static. I learned to hold the headset with one ear and listen to the storms instead, counting the seconds between flash and thunder the way my dad had taught me to count fence posts on a long walk home.

On the night the cable finally gave out, Matthews was asleep in his chair with his boots on. The lightning came down the mast in a red and yellow fork, and the hut went black. I found the torch, and by its beam the skull was sitting upright on the table, beret tipped at an angle, face turned to the cracked window. Beyond the glass the valley lit up for one second, and through the dead headset came a voice, clear as a chapel bell, reading out a grid reference we had waited three weeks to hear.

We found the platoon at dawn, cold and alive, under a rock overhang exactly where the numbers said. Matthews woke, looked at the skull for a long time, then lifted the beret off and folded it into my hands. 'You keep the luck,' he said. 'I've had enough of being the lightning rod.'