Realistic black and grey skull wearing a red paisley bandana, tattooed on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in red bandana on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic skull with a red paisley bandana tied across its brow, shown in close view on the upper arm. The skull is rendered in black and grey with soft gradient shading, and the bandana uses bold red ink with white highlights. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with skin tone and a chain necklace visible at the edges.

Realism Upper arm Skull Bandana Paisley

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you touch that box, Eddie, not till I've finished. Pass me the peppermints first. Now, where was I? Ah, the bandana. Everyone in Harrow Flats knew Lonnie Gage's red paisley square, knotted tight at the back of his head like a pirate who'd lost his ship but kept his manners. He wore it to the mill, to the picture house, to the Methodist harvest supper, and once to the county courthouse, where Judge Pardoe fined him two dollars for contempt. Lonnie paid in nickels, every one counted out on the bench, then tied the bandana tighter on the courthouse steps.

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Nobody could say for certain where it came from. Some said his mother stitched it. The truth, as Ruth Tolliver told me years later over a bad cup of coffee, is that she gave it to him on the back step of the feed store the summer before she took the Greyhound to Denver. She knotted it on him herself, pulled so hard he yelped, and said, Keep that on till I'm back. She never sent a letter. Lonnie never took the bandana off, not for swimming, not for sleep, and by the time the paisley faded to the colour of old brick, the skull underneath it looked like it was waiting for something.

Every afternoon at four he walked down to the depot and sat on the bench under the clock. People thought he was daft. He'd just shake his head and say the four o'clock was always late, and it was. When they found him in the autumn of '58, the bandana was still knotted at the back of his head, and tucked beneath it was a bus ticket to Denver, dated that same summer. Scrawled on the back, in pencil, were five words: Tie it tight, I'm coming. Well, Eddie, I still look up at four, and so does everybody else in Harrow Flats.