Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a torso cropped below the chin, with a black crop top, black jeans and a silver western belt with two ornate buckles. A black and grey skull tattoo with rib-like lines sits on the forearm, and further tattoos appear on the upper arms, hands and fingers. The shading is soft against a plain light grey background, and the lighting is even.

Forearm Upper arm Hand Skull Ribs Finger tattoo Arm tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The silver would not take the engraving until the lamp had burned down, so Ada Penrose sat in the dark of her workshop with the dead man's buckle across her knee. Tom Keel had brought it in himself the week the Calloway shaft flooded, and his brother had come after him asking for the same work, a skull with ribs, cut small enough to sit over a heart.

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She had never cut a skull before. The men of Caddon Flats wanted their horses' names, their wives' initials, a line from a hymn. Keel's brother had drawn the design on a flour sack: a cage of curved lines with nothing inside it but a single bird. Put him where the heart would be, he had said, and let the bars do the rest. She made the first cut at midnight, the chisel singing against the metal, and the lines came easier than she expected, as though the silver had been waiting to be shaped.

By the third hour the skull had a face, and the face had a crooked nose, which she had not meant to put there. She set the file down. Outside, the mine whistle sounded once, the old warning for a cage that had come up short. Nobody had been sent down that night. She counted the ribs twice and got thirteen both times, one more than the flour sack had shown her.

In the morning she gave the buckle to the boy from the assay office and told him to take it to the sheriff's stables. Then she washed the silver dust from her hands and walked down to the platform to see who had come up on the first cage. Tom Keel was standing there, wet to the knees, holding out a hand that had lost its ring.