Black and grey traditional skull tattoo wearing a top hat on skin, being worked on with a tattoo machine by a gloved artist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in top hat being tattooed

Traditional · Black and grey · Photo

A gloved tattooist works with a tattoo machine on a skull wearing a top hat. The skull is drawn with bold black outlines and grey shading, and the hat has a simple band detail. The close-up framing shows the needle and hands at the upper right, with the fresh tattoo filling the centre of the frame against a dark background.

Traditional Skull Top hat Tattoo machine Glove

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The top hat has sat on the back-parlour peg since the Thursday the number-three shaft flooded, and you take it down with both hands, the way your father taught you. A hat like that is lifted, never grabbed. Outside, Ffynnon Terrace is hosing coal dust off its doorsteps, and the chapel bell has started for Dafydd Pritchard, who was nineteen and had been on the cage a fortnight.

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Gwen Pritchard comes in with his measurements written on the back of a Co-op receipt. She wants him laid out in his Sunday suit and the good shoes, and she wants the hat, because he wore it to chapel just to annoy the deacons. You turn it in the window light. The band is grey silk gone soft at the edges, and someone once stitched a row of small pale marks along it that you have never asked about.

The hat is too wide for a boy his size, so you stuff the brim with tissue and tell her it will hold. She watches your hands, then says he was always a fool for a grand entrance, that he once rode the cage down with a tin of Quality Street held over his head like a crown. You laugh, and it surprises you both.

When she has gone you set the hat on the coffin lid, crown down, facing the window. Beyond the glass the pit wheel stands still against a white sky. Tomorrow the bell will ring again. For now there is only the hat, and the small dark dent where it sat on his head at the Whit walk, which you have brushed out with your thumb until nobody could tell.