Black and grey skull tattoo in an ornate scrolled frame with a candelabra-style ornament below, on the inner forearm.

Skull in ornate frame with chandelier on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A human skull sits inside a scrolled baroque frame, with a dotted, stippled shading style on the bone and a dark ornamental stem running down to a tiered chandelier-like motif near the wrist. The linework is fine and detailed, with heavier black areas in the eye sockets and frame to create depth. The tattoo is shown in black ink and greys on a pale forearm against a plain white background, centred and filling most of the arm.

Dotwork Realism Forearm Skull Frame Scrollwork Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Col for nine days when the stranger came up the track with a sack and no horse. Marta Oss hung his wet coat by the hearth and counted the candles. There were eleven left in the iron chandelier over the taproom, and the valley had said it would be a long winter.

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Her father had kept the skull in the frame above the bar. Nobody remembered who had carved the scrolls around it, only that it had been the first thing bought when the inn was built, and that a lit candle must always hang beneath it. So each night Marta lit one candle from the branch nearest the frame, and each morning the wax was gone. The stranger watched her do it and did not ask.

On the ninth night he asked her to leave that candle unlit. "It has been paid for," he said, and set a silver coin on the bar, worn smooth and stamped with a face nobody in the valley knew. Marta did not argue. She took the coin. In the morning the stranger was gone, and so was the coin, and in its place stood one new candle on the iron stem, still cold.

The road opened on the tenth day. Marta did not light the new candle. She waited until the old ones had burned to their brass cups, then went to the frame and found the skull's jaw turned a little toward the door, as if it had been listening all along. She lit the new candle herself that night, and for the first time in her life the skull seemed to be looking at her.