Black and gold flash design of a skull in a pharaoh headdress holding crossed bones, with scythes and an eye inside a triangle, shown without a placement on the body.

Skull pharaoh with scythes and crossed bones

Mixed · Flash

A skull wearing a striped pharaoh headdress sits at the centre, with skeletal hands crossed over a pair of blades. Scythe shapes curve up either side, an eye sits above crossed bones, and two large triangles frame the composition. The linework is fine and engraved with dense hatching and shading, and the artwork uses grey and gold on a black background.

Skull Scythe Eye Triangle Skeleton hand Headdress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis paid four shillings for the box and told me not to open it until the bells of St Peter's had struck twelve. I was nineteen, a month into sorting tin spoons and dead men's pocket watches in the back room of his Vauxhall Road shop, so I did as I was told and watched the clock through the grille.

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When the bells finished, I lifted the lid. Two curved blades lay wrapped in oilcloth gone yellow at the folds, their bone grips cold to the touch. Beneath them was a striped cloth stiff as card and a sheet of tracing paper, on which a skull in a pharaoh's headdress sat between two crossed hands, looking as though it had already priced the knives and found them fair. Someone had pressed a gold-rimmed eye into the underside of the lid. I should have sent it back the next morning. Instead I set the blades on my windowsill, where the lamp threw their shadows across the floorboards like the arms of a balance.

Each night the shadows lengthened a little more. On the seventh, I woke to find the blades turned to face the door, the oilcloth folded back as neatly as a bed being made. Mr Hollis came round before noon, took one look at the sill, and asked whether I had been counting the days. I said I had not. He said that was a pity, because the man who sold him the box had been very particular about counting.

He took the blades away in the same box, and I watched him go down Vauxhall Road with it under his arm. The sill was bare by evening. But the tracing paper stayed in my coat pocket, and every time I reached in for my keys I felt the skull's grin against my thumb, patient as a clock.