Black and grey realism chest tattoo of a skull with dark branching tree patterns and a scalpel blade in its eye socket, with fine line surgical instruments above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with branching trees and a scalpel on chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the chest, rendered with realistic shading that highlights the bone and teeth. Dark, branching tree limbs run through the skull and across its cranium, and a scalpel blade sits at its right eye socket. Faint fine line outlines of instruments, possibly forceps, appear at the top of the design against the skin.

Realism Chest Skull Bone Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had been on the high shelf of the Leeds dissecting room since the winter the cholera came, and by the second March Ellen Marr had stopped pretending the black lines across its brow were cracks in the glazing. They were twigs. Fine as horsehair at the sutures, thickening where the bone was thinnest, they ran down through the eye sockets and into the cheekbone as if someone had planted the thing in a flowerpot and forgotten to water it.

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Dr Ruthven called it damp and told her to wipe the shelf with carbolic. Ellen did, and on the Monday the twigs were longer. She laid the instruments out on the green baize each morning in their order: forceps, probe, the long bistoury, and the small scalpel with the ivory grip that the doctor used for the finer work. The scalpel went missing on a Tuesday. On the Wednesday Ellen found it standing upright in the skull's right eye socket, its blade set so neatly into the bone that she had to use both hands to draw it out, and the bone came away cold and smelling of rain.

The doctor did not thank her. He stood a long while at the shelf with his hat still on, then wrote a line in the ledger and told her the body had been claimed by the parish for burial. The skull was wrapped in linen and sent to the churchyard at Holbeck, and in the spring a black hawthorn stood up in the grave, with white blossom on it that nobody in the village would pick.