Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull tattoo behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A side-profile skull with an open jaw and detailed teeth sits on the skin behind the ear. The tattoo uses bold black outlines with grey shading across the cranium and jaw. The photograph is a close crop of the ear and neck against a plain background, with the skull placed just below and behind the ear.

Neck Skull Teeth Ear

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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

Lean in, child, the lamp has only enough oil for one more tale, so you'll have to listen with your ears as well as your eyes. Do you see that rust-brown hull crawling out of the Dunmore sand? That's the Sexton. Her bow carried a bone-white skull with its teeth bared and its jaw hung wide, as if it were shouting over the wind.

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Every crew who worked the salt flats swore the jaw moved. Not much, only a hair's width when the pressure dropped. Old Tamsin Radd, who kept the Sexton's logs in pencil because ink froze in the cold, wrote it down every time. Open meant the air was calm and the basins were safe to cross. Shut meant the wind had teeth of its own, and you turned for the mountains before it bit.

Then came the autumn of the long dust, when the sensors went blind and the crew of nine took her out anyway, because the cargo was water and water was the only money left. Tamsin stood at the bow with her palm flat against the cold bone, feeling for the tremor. The jaw was clamped shut. The young engineer laughed and said the thing was just a hunk of old ceramic. Tamsin told them to turn back, and when they didn't, she sat down on the deck and refused to move.

They turned, in the end, because the captain was a sensible woman. Forty minutes later the dune they would have crossed folded into the basin with a sound like a dropped sky. Tamsin wrote that night that the skull had stayed shut all the way down the valley and opened again only when the danger had passed. Now mind the lamp, and go to bed.