Black and grey linework drawing of a human skull floating inside a light bulb, with a lit candle cluster and wisps of smoke at its base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull inside a light bulb with candles

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and white drawing of a human skull in profile, floating in the upper half of a light bulb. Below it, a cluster of melting candles glows with radiating lines, and a thin wisp of smoke rises from the central flame. The fine hatching and stippled shading are rendered on a plain grey background, with the bulb's screw base forming the lower part of the composition.

Skull Light bulb Candle Flame Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bulb over the bench went out at a quarter past four, and Walter sent me up the ladder before dusk had properly settled on Hollin Edge. "Spare's in the biscuit tin on the porch shelf," he said. "Leave the glass case alone. That one's Mother's."

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The glass case hung above the sink, the only lamp in the cottage nobody ever switched off. Inside it a skull turned its jaw towards the window, and beneath it a clutch of candles wept wax onto a brass saucer. Walter swore his mother had lit that candle the winter the poles came up through Hollin Wood, and that the flame had never gone out, only shrunk to a bead.

I fetched the spare. When I came back Walter had his boots on and his lamp in hand, and he was looking at the case the way a man looks at a debt. "Tonight it's your turn to sit with it," he said. "Keep your hand off the switch and let it burn down on its own."

I sat. The forest pressed close outside, the pines ticking as they cooled, and the candle leaned in its saucer as though listening. Somewhere past the gate a fox barked twice and gave up. I watched the thread of smoke climb the glass and bend against the ceiling, and I thought of Walter's mother hauling water up from the beck, lighting her one candle against the dark every night while the rest of the village went over to the new current.

Near midnight the candle stopped leaning. I did not blow it out. By morning the saucer was dry and the skull had gone quiet, and Walter stood in the doorway with his lamp still lit, squinting at the sun as if it were the strange thing.