Traditional style tattoo of a skull wearing an eyepatch, with gold coins and a banner reading Goonies Never Say Die, on a limb.

Skull with eyepatch and banner on a limb

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A traditional style tattoo shows a skull wearing an eyepatch with a red and brown jewelled detail, sitting beneath a banner that reads Goonies Never Say Die. Gold coins are scattered around the base of the skull, and the outlines are bold and dark. The palette is strongly coloured in yellow, red, green and blue, with the photograph taken close up on a limb.

Traditional Other Skull Banner Coin Script Gold

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bartholomew Crane had his eyepatch on upside down when he came up the shingle, which was how I knew the tide had already turned against us. Behind him the cutter from Penhallow was grinding its anchor chain, and the men aboard were shouting the way men do when they have been promised a share of something they have not yet dug up.

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We had walked the length of Skerrow on a map drawn on the back of a flour sack, following the crooked arrows Bartholomew had inked in his grandfather's shaky hand. Three hundred paces from the gull-stained rock, then north until the cliff face looked like a skull grinning at the sea. The cave mouth was exactly that: two dark hollows for eyes and a jaw of barnacles. We crawled in with one lantern and a tin of ginger biscuits, and when his spade finally rang against iron, I thought of every story my mother had told about men who went mad under the sand.

The lid came up on rusted hinges and the coins spilled out like fish scales, warm from the rock and bright enough to make us both laugh until we coughed. Then Captain Ferris's boots rang on the stones outside, and his voice came in ahead of him, asking if we had found his gold yet. Bartholomew stood up in the lantern light with dirt on his cheek and said, "Goonies never say die," as if that settled the matter, and I held the chest's other handle while the men shoved their way in.

The chest held one more thing under the coins: a letter in a woman's hand, addressed to whoever came looking next. It asked them to share what they found with the families who had kept the island fed through the wreck winters. Ferris read it twice, then handed back the lantern without a word. We split the gold on the beach that evening, and I still have my coin on a bootlace. Above us the tide went out again, leaving the skull-shaped rock grinning at nothing but gulls.