Traditional style tattoo of a black spider with a skull head, yellow legs and three stars above, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull spider on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black spider with a skull-shaped head sits centrally, with three small stars above and a dark drip shape below. Bold black outlines and solid fills are paired with yellow and orange legs and small red accents. The design is shown on a forearm against a white cloth background.

Traditional Forearm Spider Skull Star Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Hollin Gap had been dead since the November gales, so we checked papers by torchlight and by the three stars that hung over the barrier, which Dougal swore were the only honest things on that side of the hill. The lorry came up the valley road just after two, its headlamps smeared with frost. The driver handed me a manifest for crated fairground stock bound for Carlisle, and I lifted the tarpaulin on the flatbed to find forty black spiders packed in straw, each with a bone-white face and a grin painted on like a joke nobody had told.

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I counted them twice because counting was what my hands knew how to do. Their legs were banded yellow and orange, and every one had a red bead for each eye. The driver said the paint was just paint, the sort you'd put on a carousel horse, and that the crate had been signed off in Dumfries. I believed him until I saw the stamp on the inside of the lid. It was my stamp, the crooked one I'd cut myself the winter I took this post, and the signature beneath it was my own hand, from a form I had never filed.

I let them through. Dougal asked why, and I told him the spiders had walked their own road a long time before either of us was born. At first light I went down to the barrier and found one of the spiders sitting on the post with a dark bead of oil hanging from a foreleg, the way a candle drips when nobody has trimmed the wick. It had taken the paper from the crate and chewed the corner of my name off neatly. Then it went over the wall and down the valley, its three stars already dissolving in the grey.