Flash design of a cream skull with a pentagram on its forehead, framed by red ribbon banners reading Salt and Burn, in a traditional illustrative style.

Skull with pentagram and Salt & Burn banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A skull in bone cream with a pentagram on the brow sits above two red ribbon banners, the lower one reading SALT & BURN. A white ring with dark ornamental scrollwork and faint markings surrounds the skull against a black background. Shading uses line work and flat tones, with red, cream and white as the main colours.

Traditional Skull Pentagram Lettering Ornament Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell kept the salt in a tobacco tin and the matches in her boot, because her grandmother had said the Ashgrove cut-through only let you pass if you came prepared. The dust hung gold behind the Land Rover when the figure stepped out of the heat shimmer at the cattle grid. She knew the walk before she knew the face. Tom Abbot had walked like that the summer he drowned in the reservoir, one shoulder dropped, as if carrying a sack that wasn't there.

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She didn't stop. She pulled alongside, wound the window down an inch and tipped a pinch of grey salt onto the sill. "You're not on my list," she said. He smiled with the wrong number of teeth and asked for a lift to Carrow. Her grandmother's notebook said the dead always asked for something small, a lift, a light, a drink of water, because small things were how they got a foot across the line. The tarmac ahead boiled like a pan left on the stove.

He leaned on the door and the paint blistered where his hand touched it. Nell struck a match and held it up. The flame stood straight in the still air, bluer than it should be, and she thought of the ribbon her grandmother had painted across the dashboard years back, SALT and BURN, with the ring of scratched letters around it that nobody in the family could read. Tom's face sagged like wet paper. "You always were a rotten driver," he said, and then he was only dust going sideways across the road.

Nell sat with the engine ticking and the match burnt down to her fingers. She shook the last of the salt into a line along the sill, struck another match and drove on at forty, eyes on the mirror, where the cattle grid stood empty in the glare. She left the window open the width of a thumb, in case anyone else came asking for a lift.