Solid black skull design in a blackwork style, with a silhouetted lineman climbing a utility pole down the centre of the face, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Skull with lineman climbing a utility pole

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black silhouette of a skull, with a utility pole running down the centre so that it forms the nose and a lineman in a hard hat climbs it. The design uses solid black fills and clean edges with no shading or grey tones, and the white background is left open. It is a flat, high-contrast design shown on its own, with no body visible.

Blackwork Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had been at the valley since teatime, and by nine the lines were singing like wet fingers round a glass. Gwen Pritchard rang the depot to say her kitchen had gone dark, then the Lewises', then the whole of Nant Ddu, and Mick sent me up the hill with a torch in my teeth and a coil of copper on my shoulder because I was the one without anyone waiting at home.

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The pole on Cefn Bryn was older than my father, creosote-black and leaning a degree into the gale, its crossarm sitting across the dark like a bar on a door. I got my belt round it and my boots on the steps and started up, counting rungs the way you count sheep through a gate. Halfway, the wind dropped the way it does before it spits, and I could see the whole valley laid out below in a ring of silver roofs, every one of them black.

At the top the insulator had cracked clean through, a little white ghost of porcelain hanging off the arm. Ten minutes with the spare jumper in my numb fingers and my heart knocking against the timber. I was wrestling the wire into place when a light came on across the river, one small yellow square in a window, then a second. The old boy in that cottage had been sitting in the dark for an hour, waiting for someone daft enough to climb.

I threw the switch from the crossarm. The valley blinked back all at once, and I hung there against the sky, grinning like a skull on a stick. Down in the village somebody put the kettle on, and I hoped it was Gwen, because she'd have been wanting a cup for an hour already.