Black and grey dotwork skull tattoo with a torn skin effect, placed over the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with torn skin on an elbow

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A skull emerges through a ripped-open section of skin, with jagged edges and a toothed jaw at the top. The eye sockets and nasal cavity are filled with dense stippled dotwork, while the bone outlines and teeth use bold blackwork lines and solid shading. The image is black and grey on a close, slightly soft-focus crop of an elbow with a plain background.

Dotwork Blackwork Other Skull Torn skin Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The storm took the top off the dunes on Scarrow the week after my father's funeral, and by morning the sea had peeled back the turf like a bad bandage. I went down with a spade and a lamp because somebody had to see what the water wanted. Under the marram roots, where the sand was stained the colour of strong tea, a skull looked up at me with its eyes full of shadow.

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Mrs Hannay at the shop said it was a drowned man from the Spanish ship, and Ewan at the pier swore it was a sheep, and the minister said nothing at all, only looked at the wall. I knew better. The jaw was still hinged, its teeth crowded and yellow, and when I brushed the grit from the nose hole there was a dark speckling inside, like ink dotted into the bone by a patient hand.

I carried it up to the old chapel loft and sat with it through three tides. It wasn't cursed, whatever the children said. It was only tired of being covered. Every few hours the wind tore another strip off the dune and the bone pushed a little further into the light, like something knocking to be let in.

On the fourth morning I wrapped it in oilcloth, walked it down to the shore, and set it where the tide could reach its brow. The sea came up grey and took it without a word. By noon the dune was whole again, and the gulls were picking along the wrack where the skull had lain, as if it had never been found at all.