Black blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a skull with spiral eyes inside a triangle, with stylised lettering above, on the inside of a forearm.

Skull in triangle on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull with spiral eyes and a stippled, shaded face sits within a triangle outline, with stylised lettering across the top of the design. The linework is bold and the shading is built from dense dots and solid black areas. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the forearm against a plain white top and a sandstone wall.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Skull Triangle Spiral Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came late to Harrow Fold that year, and the ewes were still standing in the lower field when the old man's boy went down with the lantern to count them. Nobody remembered who had hung the bone in the ash tree by the gate. It had been there longer than the barn roof, a skull the size of a turnip, its eyes scraped into spirals with a nail. The children said it turned to watch whoever passed under the triangle of wire strung between the posts.

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The boy, Tobias Greave, was nine and did not believe any of it. He said so at supper, and his mother said that was exactly what the skull liked best. His father said nothing. He had been mending the gate for three days with stiff hands and had no patience left for talk.

On the night of the first hard frost, Tobias found one ewe missing and her tracks leading out past the ash. The snow had stopped and the sky had gone the colour of pewter. He followed the prints to the wire and stopped. The skull hung there in the lantern light, grey with rime, its spiral eyes holding the moon. The letters across its brow had filled with frost, so that they read like a word he almost knew.

He stood a long while. Then he took off his cap, laid it on the wire, and said plainly that he would take the ewe home and owed the skull a debt for the favour. In the lower field the ewe lifted her head from the drift where she had lain down, and walked back to the barn without being asked. The cap stayed on the wire until spring, and nobody on Harrow Fold ever moved it.