Skull in profile with HAHA on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bold solid black skull in side profile sits on a pale lower leg, with the word HAHA set inside the brain area and a second word running down the spine. The skull shows an eye socket, a grinning row of teeth and a cut-away jaw, all drawn with thick black outlines and white negative space. The image is a close, straight-on photo against a grey wall, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Blackwork Calf Skull Profile Brain Teeth Lettering Skeleton

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had counted forty-one windfalls by the time the wasps found the bruised ones under the Bramley. Late August in the orchard meant the grass had gone the colour of old string and the ladders leaned against the wall with nobody to climb them. Her uncle Len should have been sorting the good fruit from the bad, but he had dragged an upturned crate into the shade and sat with his back to the stone, shaking.

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"Say it," he wheezed. "Say what?" "The sexton joke. The one with the pear tree." She had heard it forty times that summer. Each time he reached the end he laughed until he had to wipe his eyes on his cuff, and each time she waited for the punchline to make sense. It never did. He just tapped the side of his head with two fingers and said, "Still in there, love. Rattling about with the rest of it."

The consultant in Hereford had used the word "tumour" the way other people used the word "weather", as if it were something that drifted over the county and was nobody's fault. Len had listened with the same grin he kept for the bees and the Methodist minister. Afterwards he asked whether the laughing was part of it, and the consultant said possibly, and Len declared it the best news he'd had all year.

At dusk she loaded the cart herself, badly, one apple at a time. When she looked back, Len had slumped on the crate with his head tipped against the wall, and the wasps had settled on the bruised fruit beside him as though they had been invited. She didn't wake him. She sat down in the grass, picked up a split windfall and laughed at it until her own chest hurt, because it was the only answer she had.