Pencil-shaded tattoo design of a skull with heart-shaped eye sockets, a bow on top and crossed bones behind it, shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with bow and crossed bones

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a skull with heart-shaped eye sockets, a bow tied on the top of the head and a crossed-bones motif behind the jaw. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, building form on the bones and in the eye sockets. The design is drawn in greys on a plain white background.

Skull Bow Heart

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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

Gather in, gather in, and mind the puddles, because the rain has come down off the hill again and it means to stay till Tuesday. Now, you'll have heard of Captain Jem Harrow, who sailed out of Whitby with forty men and one sweetheart he never once wrote to. That's the trouble with pirates. They think a ship is sweetheart enough.

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His mother was Hester Crane, who sold ribbon at the Saturday fair on Fish Quay, a yard for a penny, and a bow tied free if you looked her in the eye. The captain came home from the Azores with a chest of Spanish coin and asked her to marry him. She said she'd think on it. She thought on it for nineteen years, and by then he'd been hanged at Execution Dock, and his skull was sitting in a jar of brine on the harbourmaster's shelf.

Hester went down there with a pot of black paint and a length of red silk. Nobody stopped her, for she was owed a favour and everybody knew it. She tied that bow on his crown so he'd look presentable at the wedding, and she painted two hearts over his eyes, because a man who never once looked at her properly deserved to be looked at by a heart.

Now they say on wet nights you can hear the fair folk tuning up along the quay, and a woman laughing too loud, and if you ever see a skull with a ribbon on it, you tip your hat and pay what you owe. Mind your change, now. The rain's washing the red silk down the gutter, and the captain's still waiting on his answer.