Realistic tattoo of a grey skull with red tissue visible through a star-shaped tear in skin, on an area of upper leg or arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull inside a torn star

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A star is shown as if torn open on the skin, revealing a shaded grey and white skull with dark eye sockets and a open jaw. The interior of the tear has red, fleshy shading with a ribbed texture, and the skin edges are lifted with a dark outline. The image is a close crop with the design filling most of the frame against pale skin.

Realism Other Skull Star Torn skin Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the wind has dropped enough to let me back out to the Marguerite. Ada says I am being stubborn, that a man of sixty-one should not go down forty feet on a bad knee. She is probably right. But the hull lies canted on the shelf below Scarth Point like a sleeping dog, and the forward hatch is the only part of her nobody has picked clean.

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The hatch came away today with a shriek of rust, and behind it was a cabin full of silt and a rack of green bottles. I went in on the guide line with the torch. Halfway down the passage the beam caught something nailed to the bulkhead: a tin star, its five points split open as if something had burst out of it. Inside the split, a grey skull grinned over a lining of red oilcloth, ribbed like the boards of an old hull. Someone had fixed it there with four copper tacks. Someone had wanted it seen.

I brought it up in the bag with the brass compass. Ada turned it over under the kitchen lamp and went quiet, which frightens me more than shouting does. Her grandfather used to talk about the Marguerite's last skipper, a man who painted stars on everything he owned and swore the sea would one day split open like a tin and give back what it had taken. He drowned six weeks before anyone reported the wreck missing, and nobody ever found his body.

Ada has set the star on the windowsill with the red side facing the harbour. I have told her it is only tin and paint. Tonight, when the lamp burns low and the tide turns against the quay, I could swear the skull's jaw sits a little wider than it did this morning.