Black and grey traditional tattoo of a skull with an exposed brain on top, shown on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with exposed brain on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull with a brain sitting on top of its head, drawn with bold black outlines and solid black eye sockets. The skull is split down the middle, with one half showing curved lines and the other showing a grid of teeth, and grey shading gives the brain its texture. The design is in black and grey and sits centrally on the forearm, with part of another tattoo visible at the top left.

Traditional Forearm Skull Brain

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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

The skull over the pawnbroker's door on Tallow Lane had always been cracked down the middle, one half grinning at the street and the other half turned to the wall. Nobody on the lane could say who had hung it there. Ada Merrow found out on the night of her father's funeral, when she came down to the shop in her stockings and saw a grey lump sitting on its crown, folded like a wet cabbage, with the gaslight catching the ridges.

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She knew better than to touch it. Her father had kept the ledger of other people's troubles for forty years, and the old women said the skull took payment in whatever a person could not bear to carry home. So she fetched the brass scales from under the counter and set a pawn ticket in one pan. On the other she placed the brain, which was cold and heavier than it looked, and it sank that pan right to the boards.

Past midnight the bells of St Clement's struck one, and the skull began to speak, though its jaw never moved. It said the brain had never been the old man's. It was hers, and he had pawned it to keep her from carrying it through the winter. Ada asked what the price had been. The skull turned its black eyes toward the empty chair by the stove, where her father used to sit with his hands folded, and said nothing more.

In the morning she wrapped the brain in a clean handkerchief and put it in a jar of vinegar on the windowsill. When the lamplighter came round at dawn, the skull had turned its grin to the street, and the scales on the counter read nothing at all.