Realism tattoo of a snarling skull wrapped in dark flames and smoke, with red and grey shading, on the calf.

Skull with flames on a lower leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A skull with bared teeth and hollow eye sockets is surrounded by flame-like and smoke-like shapes that curl up and around it. The skull is shaded in soft greys and browns with dense black in the open mouth and the lower flames, giving a three-dimensional effect. Red tones in the flames add colour against the skin, and the design fills the length of the leg.

Realism Calf Skull Flame Smoke Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clamp had been smouldering for three days when I heard the knocking from inside the stack. Four blows, a pause, then four more. Every charcoal burner in Hollin Wood knows that sound and pretends not to. I kept feeding the turf and told myself it was only the timber settling.

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Our cottage sits where the trees give up and the village begins, so the smoke from my clamp drifts over the back gardens of Greywell every week of the burn. The old women complain about their washing. Mr Pardoe, who keeps bees, says his hives go quiet whenever I am burning. Nobody else wanted the edge of the wood, and the wood has always been generous, as my mother used to say, meaning the fallen oak and dead ash I could sell by the sack.

On the fourth morning I raked the ash out with my bare hands, because the cold had already got into it, and the skull rolled out onto the frost. It was blackened across the crown and grey at the brow, its jaw dropped open, every tooth bared as if it had been mid-shout at something behind me. Flames seemed to have grown up out of its cheekbones, curling towards the empty sockets and thinning into smoke at the temple. Where the mouth gaped, the dark was so deep I could have posted a letter into it.

I carried it down to the lychgate in my apron and set it on the wall facing the church. By supper the bees were back at work and the old women had stopped grumbling about the washing. Mr Pardoe swore the smoke over the gardens had turned that afternoon, running uphill and back into the trees, as if something had finally been shown the way home.