Colour traditional tattoo of a blue skull with red eyes, crossed wheat-tipped arrows and a banner reading DEATH BY GLUTEN, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with wheat arrows and banner on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A blue-toned skull with red eyes and small horns sits across a banner that reads DEATH BY GLUTEN, with a bundle of wheat-tipped arrows behind it and more sticks fanning out below. The design uses bold black outlines with flat, solid colour fills in blue, purple, red and yellow. It is centred on a forearm photographed at a slight angle, with a blurred background.

Traditional Forearm Skull Banner Wheat Arrow Horn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ovens at Pennick's had been lit since three, and by half past four Dora had decided that Harold Vine would never again sell a single loaf on Thorne Street. She had decided this before, usually on Thursdays, but this time she had evidence: a crate on his step, stencilled with a blue skull, two arrows of wheat crossed behind it, and the words DEATH BY GLUTEN curling across the middle like a bad ribbon.

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Harold had painted it himself, she was certain, because nobody else on the street could make a skull look so pleased with itself. He had set it out at dawn beside his bins with a hand-lettered card that read FREE TO ANYONE WHO CAN PROVE THE FLOUR IS SAFE. Dora read it twice, floury hands on her hips, then sent her nephew Sam across with a jar of rye starter and a note in capitals of her own.

By six the crate was empty. Half of Thorne Street had come for a free loaf and stayed for the argument, and the other half had come to see who would win it. Harold came out in his apron, looked at the queue, then at Dora in her doorway, and for once said nothing clever. He lifted the lid of the crate, which she had not noticed was lined with his sourdough, cooling in rows, every loaf scored with a tiny grinning skull.

She bought two. They were warm through the paper, and when she tore one open the crumb was pale and perfect, and she thought, with a sinking sort of joy, that the skulls had only ever been a joke he had been waiting for someone to catch him telling.