Black and grey skull tattoo with ornamental shapes on the back of a hand, which is holding a black ceramic skull mug.

Skull tattoo on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds up a glossy black ceramic skull mug filled with a light brown drink against a plain pale background. The back of the hand carries a black and grey skull tattoo with shaded bones and surrounding angular shapes, with small star marks and partial lettering further down the wrist. The soft, bright composition centres the mug and tattoo against the blank wall.

Traditional Hand Skull Star Flower Lettering Mug Coffee

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother kept the cup on the top shelf above the range, the one shaped like a skull, and nobody drank from it but Aldous Fenn, the charcoal-burner, when the frost came down off the ridge. He said the black glaze held the heat longer than any tin mug. I believed him, because he had walked out past the last oak every winter for forty years and never once come back with frostbite.

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The night the lamps went out in Stennet, I was sent up the path with a lantern and the skull cup full of broth for him. The trees up there don't keep still. Stars showed through the gaps in the branches in little clusters, as if someone had pressed tacks into the dark, and the path forked where it always forked. I took the left fork, because the right one has the old stone marker with the carved hand on it, and nobody goes right.

Fenn sat by his clamp of smouldering wood with his hands wrapped around nothing. He took the cup without looking at me, drank, and said the broth was too salt. Then he tipped his chin at the frost the wind had thrown against the bark, sharp and angular as broken glass, and said they'd come for the boy next. I asked which boy. He only laughed and said the cup was the only honest thing in the village, because it showed you what was waiting at the bottom.

Going down, I looked into the cup in the lantern light. There was nothing in it but dark liquid and my own face, and the eye sockets of the skull, faintly lit, looked back at me the way they always had. At the foot of the path the lamps of Stennet were burning again. Mother stood at the gate with her arms folded, and she asked nothing about the broth. She only held out her hand for the cup.