Woman with long wavy hair seen from behind, wearing layered silver necklaces and a dark sleeveless top, with a black and grey skull tattoo on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull tattoo on upper arm beside layered necklaces

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A partly cropped photograph of a woman seen from behind, with long wavy hair falling over one shoulder and several layers of silver chains, beads and coin pendants at her neck. A black and grey skull tattoo is visible on her upper arm, with another tattoo partly visible at the edge of the frame on the opposite arm. The image has a warm, muted tone and the subject fills most of the frame.

Upper arm Skull Hair Necklace Coin Chain Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abigail Penhale never let a coin leave her apron without weighing it on her tongue first. That was the rule at her stall on Gull Row, where the night fair set up under the lamps every Michaelmas and the silversmiths came up from the harbour with their trays. She had buried two husbands and kept the same brass scales through both, and the boys who sold her broken spoons learned early that she could tell a clipped shilling from a good one by the sound it made on the wood.

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On the third night of the fair a stranger came to the stall with a sack of old thaler coins and a skull carved in boxwood, no bigger than a plum. He wanted them strung into a collar, he said, the way they wore them in the port cities where he had lived, with the dead man's face hung in the middle so the wearer would never forget where the money came from. Mrs Penhale told him the boxwood was rotten at the eye sockets. He laughed and said everything was rotten at the eye sockets if you looked close enough.

She drilled the coins that night by a candle, one hole each, and threaded them on hemp while the fiddler played the same reel over and over. The skull she set in the centre of the chain, and when she held it up to the flame its jaw seemed to hang open, as if it had been waiting to say something. She counted the coins twice. There were thirty-one, which was one more than he had brought.

The stranger never came back for the collar. In the morning there was only a single thaler on the scales, warm from someone's pocket, and beside it a pinch of salt on the wood, the sort sailors carried for luck. Mrs Penhale put the coin in her apron and wore the collar herself down to the harbour, and it was said for years after that she could hear a debt being owed from the far end of a crowded quay.