Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with galaxy smoke trail design

Mixed · Flash

A painted design on tan paper shows a side-view human skull in soft grey tones, with its lower jaw open and teeth visible. A dark blue and purple galaxy or nebula form, with small dark circles, streams from the skull's mouth and curls to the left across the page. Soft edges and a sketchy, airbrushed finish give it a painterly look, and paint brushes and a palette sit at the top of the frame on a wooden table.

Skull Galaxy Nebula Smoke Space

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Hollin Cross road for nine days when the painter came down the stairs with his palette under his arm and asked for more of the grey paint, the one I kept for the chimney stones. I told him the chimney was grey enough already. He only smiled and said a skull needed to be the colour of old bone before it could hold anything in.

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He worked at the end table by the window, brushes standing in a jar of cloudy water, and each evening he left the sheet drying by the stove. The skull rose out of the paper slowly, like something surfacing through ice. Then he began on the smoke. He dabbed indigo and violet with a rag, flicked black spatters across the wet paint, and pressed his thumb into it to make holes. "That's where it goes out," he said. "Where it goes out is always the part that matters."

On the ninth night the wind dropped and the stars came out hard over the pass. He opened the inn door, stood in the drift up to his shins, and blew a long breath of pipe smoke into the cold. It rose and turned, and for a moment I could have sworn it had a shape, a slow curl of nebula rolling over the drifts toward the black bulk of the mountain. He came back in with frost on his eyebrows and said the road would be open by morning.

It was. His tracks were gone under the new snow by the time the coach came through, and the painting was gone from the table too. But when the cloud lifted over the pass that spring, there was a long dark smear of blue high in the sky that did not move with the wind, and I have never once seen it drift.