Black and white flash design of a skull pierced by a dagger, with the words MISTAKES WERE MADE beneath, suitable as a tattoo design.

Skull pierced by a dagger with lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of a human skull with a dagger driven through the top of the head and out of the side of the jaw. The linework is bold with stippled dots and speckling across the bone and blade, and the bold capitals MISTAKES WERE MADE sit centred below. The plain white background and centred layout make it read as a stand-alone design sheet.

Skull Dagger Blade Lettering Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bad knives went up the Vell pass in a sack on the third day of the thaw, carried by Tam Ruddock, who had been told by his aunt to sell them to drovers before anyone asked where they were made. Aunt Otta had stopped pretending years ago. The steel cracked as it cooled, the tangs worked loose, and the handles were whatever wood happened to be lying near the bellows.

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At the top of the pass, where the wind kept the path marker upright, a drover named Gerrit Hold stopped to rest his mule. The marker was an old iron spike driven through a bleached skull, and nobody living remembered whose skull it was or why it had been pinned there. Gerrit weighed one blade in his palm and tested the point against the skull's brow. It went in with a dull tock. "Your aunt's work?" he asked. Tam said the blade was his and the pommel was hers. Gerrit laughed, paid for three knives, and hung them from his saddle like a man who had decided not to be disappointed.

Tam stayed to watch the mule pick its way down the far side. Scratched into the rock beneath the skull were letters worn almost smooth by weather. He crouched and traced them with his thumb: MISTAKES WERE MADE. Someone long ago had meant it as a joke, or a warning, or a confession, and the smiths of the Vell had kept saying it ever since, mostly over burnt bread and bent nails.

He walked back down before dark, the sack empty and light on his shoulder. At the forge he told Aunt Otta that a drover had bought the worst of them, and that the pass was still standing, and that the skull had looked, if anything, pleased. She said she would start on better steel in the morning, and went on hammering the same bar she had been hammering all day.