Black, grey and red realistic skull tattoo with splashed ink and script lettering on the inner forearm.

Skull with red splashes on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic human skull sits on the forearm, with grey and black shading, dark ink splatters and drips running down from it. Red ink streaks and splashes add colour, and a handwritten script quote runs along the wrist below the skull, partly legible. The dark background isolates the arm, and the skull is the focal point.

Realism Lettering Forearm Skull Script Splatter Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 14th March 1956. The rain has finally stopped, so I can hear the Nene again over the back wall of the yard. Mr Pell wants the lettering for the new funeral parlour done before Easter, black on white, with a border he calls respectful. I told him respectful is a word for a lid that doesn't rattle, and he didn't laugh, which is how I knew he'd meant it.

Keep reading

The widow Harrold came in this afternoon with a photograph of her husband's skull, which the doctor at Thrapston had kept in a biscuit tin and which she wanted, she said, painted rather than buried. I did not ask why. I took her sum, a shilling more than I'd have asked for lettering, and spent the evening with a sable brush and the ink I keep for the church notices. I thinned it until it ran like weather, then flicked it from the brush so the dark splashes fell where they liked. Where the skull's eye sockets sat, I let the black pool and dry. The red I mixed from the fire brigade's tin of signal paint, which is the only red in town that doesn't fade in the window.

Beneath the skull I wrote out a verse I copied from the flyleaf of the parish register, in my best copperplate, because a man should write his warnings as neatly as his bills. When Pell came back for the proofs he read it twice with his lips moving. He said it was unlucky to put scripture on a grave sign. I said it was on the church wall already, and he could go and read it there himself.

I did not wipe the drips from the bottom edge of the board. They run past the border and onto the step, a long red thread that will be walked over by morning, and I have left it that way on purpose.