Black ink skull above the words DEAD MEN DON'T BITE, tattooed on the upper arm of a person wearing a grey t-shirt.

Skull with Dead Men Don't Bite on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink skull with a cartoon-like grin sits above the slogan DEAD MEN DON'T BITE in bold capitals. The linework is clean and uniform with simple solid fills, and the design is set against plain skin with no colour. The close crop centres the tattoo on the upper arm, with a grey t-shirt sleeve and a faint blue printed graphic in the background.

Upper arm Skull Slogan Text Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worked the night shift at Hollin Cross for eleven years, and in all that time the 23:40 has never once been late. So when it pulls in twenty minutes behind, its doors sighing open onto an empty carriage, you are already reaching for the radio before you notice the smell of wet earth drifting off the platform.

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A man in a long grey coat steps down with a ticket held between two fingers like a playing card. His head is a skull, clean as a bleached teacup, and it grins at you with the cheerful malice of a cartoon. "Single to Ashby Lane," he says. "Return's a formality." You check the machine. The fare is printed in your own handwriting, dated 1987, and the name beside it is yours.

You tell him the line's closed. He tells you the line has never been closed, only forgotten, and that dead men don't bite, whatever the lads at the Dog and Pilot say. You laugh, because it is a cold night and you have had three coffees. Then he leans in and you see that his teeth are very small and very neat and entirely your own, filed down the way you used to file the edges of your ticket stubs when you were nineteen and waiting for someone who never arrived.

The train doors close without a sound. On the platform the clock reads 23:40 and stays there. You stamp the ticket, hand it back, and watch him wave through the glass, and you realise you have been standing on the wrong side of the yellow line for a very long time.