Black and grey tattoo of a skull inside a circular sun stone medallion with carved patterns, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull within a sun stone medallion on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular medallion with a central skull sits on the outer upper arm, with a white sleeve visible at the top edge. The carved-looking linework is rendered in black and grey with shaded highlights, and the design fills most of the frame. The background skin is smooth and evenly lit, with the tattoo centred in the composition.

Upper arm Skull Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marion,

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The cook's log says we are four hundred miles from anywhere that sells bread, so I have started making it from the last sack of flour, and the stove has taken against me. Mr Pell, the bosun, brought up a stone from the hold this morning, wrapped in a sail offcut and reeking of bilge. He says it came off a wreck the owners never mentioned on the manifest. It is round as a dinner plate, cut all over with rings and notched teeth, and in the middle sits a skull with its jaw open, as if it has just remembered a joke.

Pell wants it fixed to the bulkhead above the range. I told him a galley is no place for something that grins at the soup. He laughed and said the men would stop complaining about the biscuits if they had something to look at. Last night the boy Tobias counted the notches with his finger and got to nineteen rings before the lamp went out, and he swears the skull turned its eyes when he reached the end.

Here is the thing I haven't told Pell. The mate read the markings and says the rings are a count of days, not a map. Each notch is a day somebody survived, and the skull sits where the count runs out. There are fourteen notches left uncut. Nobody aboard can say whether they were carved before the wreck or after.

I scrubbed the stone clean this afternoon with vinegar and a scrap of wire wool. Under the grime the grooves are sharp as new. I have set it on the flour tin as a weight, so the lid stays down against the damp. Tomorrow I will cut the next notch myself, and I expect I will use the bread knife, since it is the only thing on this ship I trust to stay sharp.

Your loving sister, Nell