Traditional style skull tattoo with heart-shaped eye sockets, a pink bow, crossed teal crochet hooks and two banners reading Hook Fast and Die Warm, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with crochet hooks and pink bow on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skull with heart-shaped eye sockets and a grinning jaw sits at the centre, with a pink bow above it and two teal crochet hooks crossed behind it. A banner across the top reads Hook Fast and a banner across the bottom reads Die Warm. Bold outlines and soft grey shading give the skull form, while the bow and hooks add flat pink and teal colour.

Traditional Forearm Skull Bow Banner Heart Ribbon

Find an artist for this

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

The blankets were due at the lifeboat house by Friday, and by Wednesday Mrs Agnes Dunmow had counted the stitches on the last one three times and got three different answers. Outside the Methodist hall the sleet came sideways off the harbour wall. Inside, eleven women sat in a horseshoe of tea-stained chairs, hooks clicking like a clock that had lost its nerve.

Keep reading

Pearl Ashworth had brought her own hooks, teal ones bought in Scarborough, and she held them up as if they were a pair of cutlasses. "Hook fast," she said, which was what the old coxswain's widow had told them all in the spring, "and die warm, Agnes, or you'll be sat there knitting your own shroud." Somebody laughed too loudly. Somebody else dropped a ball of grey wool, and it rolled under the trestle table, past the boots of the vicar's cat, into the dark where the stove ticked.

Agnes crawled after it on her knees, her good skirt gathering dust, and found the ball lodged against a rusted paraffin tin. When she sat back up the room had gone quiet. The clicking had stopped. Pearl was holding the half-finished blanket to her chest, one corner pulled tight around her own hand.

The lifeboat went out at two that morning to a Dutch coaster that had lost its rudder. Agnes was at the slipway with the blankets stacked in the back of the van, and when the men hauled the first survivor up onto the stones, the wool was the only thing dry enough to wrap him in. Nobody said the stitches had held. They didn't need to.