Black and grey tattoos across two forearms show a skull with three roses, a large feather, a leafy pattern, stars and Roman numerals.

Skull, roses and feather on forearms

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two forearms covered in tattoos, with a skull and three roses at the centre of one arm and a large feather with stars on the other. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and smooth, with a banner carrying script above the skull. The tones are almost entirely grey and black, with some reddish tint on the skin near the feather and stars, and the composition is taken straight on at close range.

Realism Botanical Forearm Skull Rose Feather Leaves Star Roman numeral Banner Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent the Lessways owned had a hole in its roof the size of a cartwheel, and every night the stars came through it and lay on the sawdust like coins nobody wanted. Old Ada Lessway said that was the only honest light left in the county, so the children were allowed to sit in it.

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Her grandson Tobias was the strongest man in the company and the saddest, because the company was dying. The dappled horses had gone to a knacker in Lincoln. The roses painted on the lead wagon had faded to grey. When the bills stopped coming, he walked out past the fence to the gallows field where the wind kept a feather snagged on a wire, and he sat with his back against the post and waited for the Pale Man, who everyone said had bought the ringmaster's soul in exchange for a summer that never ended.

The Pale Man came in his good coat and sat down beside him. He did not ask for a soul. He asked for the skull painted on the wagon door, the one that had grinned at every crowd since before Ada was born. "Take it," Tobias said, "it has no teeth left to bite you." The Pale Man laughed, and the laugh sounded like a wheel finding its rut, and he rose and walked away across the field without looking back.

In the morning the wagon door was bare wood, the roses beside it had turned red again, and the feather on the wire had become a quill that wrote the company's wages in a hand nobody could read. Ada kept the ledger. That night, when the stars came through the roof and fell across the page, one line was ticked off in ink that had not been there before: the Pale Man, paid in full.