Realism colour tattoo on the upper arm showing a golden skull medallion above a bearded figure in a hat with tentacle-like facial hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull medallion and tentacled figure on arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A realistic colour tattoo shows a carved, ornate skull medallion above a bearded figure wearing a hat, with tentacle-like strands forming the beard. The shading is smooth and detailed, with warm orange, brown and green tones dominating the piece. The tattoo fills most of the frame, with the medallion at the top and the figure's face centred below it on the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind that candle, because this is the part where the gold starts to talk. You have heard of Carrow Sound. You have not heard of the Tidemarch kings, who ruled the drowned kingdom of Ysmere back when the sea still had fields in it. Their treasury was a single silver medallion struck with a skull that grinned at every man who looked at it, and the kings hung it over the gate so the people would know what the crown was worth.

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Then came Hollin Dask, a clerk with ink on his cuffs and a tongue like a dropped anchor. He stole the medallion on the night of the Harvest Fire and sailed for open water. The sea, which had been waiting for a man greedy enough, took him at his word. By the third dawn his beard had begun to coil. Not hair, mind you. Long pale strands that moved against the wind, curled round the rigging and tasted the salt, and spoke, very softly, in the voice of the drowned.

He could never take off his hat, nor the medallion, which had fused to his chest like a barnacle to a keel. In every harbour he came to, the children counted his tendrils and ran home. He sailed for a hundred years, so the story goes, looking for one shore that would take the gold back.

Last winter a girl from the salt flats walked out to the wreck of the Tidemarch barge with a lantern and a bag of stolen bread. She asked the beard what it wanted. It told her the truth, which is the only thing the sea has ever been good for. She gave it the bread, and she gave it the lantern. Then, very politely, she asked for the medallion back. Which of you would have had the nerve?

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