Solid black skull tattoo on the upper arm with a row of standing figure silhouettes in the jaw area, in blackwork style.

Skull with figure silhouettes on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the upper arm, with its eye sockets and nasal area left as skin and its lower part filled with a row of standing figure silhouettes. The skull is solid black ink with crisp edges and a slightly rough, textured fill, while the figures are cut out in skin tone. The image is a close, angled photo of the shoulder, with the tattoo as the clear focus against a plain teal top and an indoor background.

Blackwork Upper arm Skull Silhouette Figure Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By eleven the rain had found the gaps in the awnings, and the crowd at Harcourt Street market had bunched under my table the way crowds do when they want to feel clever about getting wet. I sold bone dice from a shoebox. Black ones, mostly, with white pips that rubbed off if you handled them carelessly. Nobody came for the dice. They came for the one with five pips clustered on a single face, which I had carved so that it looked back up at whoever was rolling it.

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A man in a yellow mac put his wristwatch on the cloth and rolled it. Five. The crowd made the noise a crowd makes when it has been waiting for something to go its way. Behind him the people kept shuffling forward, strangers with their hands in their pockets, and each time I glanced up there were more of them, pressing toward the stall out of the wet and filling the space where the next pitch should have been. None of them had dripping hair or wet shoulders. The rain ran off the awnings in strings and went straight through them.

My father had taught me to count stock, never people. So I started counting, and got to forty before I stopped myself. The man in the mac did not want his watch back. He only nodded at the dice and then at the crowd, as if they were his to pay.

When the wind dropped, the market was empty except for me, the shoebox, and a row of small puddles on the cobbles where the figures had stood. Each one held a single bright spot, five dots arranged like an eye. I packed the dice away one by one. The watch was still ticking on the cloth, and I could not for the life of me remember which of us had won.