Black and grey realism tattoo of several skulls with chain links covering the forearm, shown in a close photo with shiny skin.

Skulls and chain on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with several skulls, the largest in the centre with its jaw open and teeth visible, and smaller skulls stacked above and below. Chain links wrap around the upper skulls and cut diagonally across the arm. The shading is heavy and smooth, using deep blacks, soft greys and bright highlights to give the skulls a three-dimensional look, and the skin is shown in the photo with no colour ink.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spade hit something that rang, and for a second I thought it was the old gate hinge Mr Pardoe had sworn was buried somewhere under the rhubarb. Instead I pulled up a length of chain, black with clay, each link as thick as my thumb and furred with rust that came away on my gloves like soot.

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Aunt Win had been clear about the garden when she left it to me. Walled on three sides, the fourth opening onto the yard of the old Lusby gaol, which had been turned into allotments in the fifties, with nothing in it that she hadn't already told me about. She had known a great deal, I was learning, and had kept most of it to herself.

I worked the chain free over the next hour, sitting on an upturned crate with the trowel across my knees. Lower down, where the bed sloped toward the wall, the spade turned up a stone skull, then another, grey and furred with lichen, their eye sockets packed with loam. Three of them, stacked in the soil like a child's game of pyramids, each with a jaw full of carved teeth and a link of iron still looped through one cheekbone, as if someone had meant to hang them from the wall and then thought better of it.

I carried them up to the kitchen and wrapped them in a tea towel. That evening I started a letter to the parish council, then tore it up, because the letter I really wanted was to Win. I didn't know how to ask her what she had been keeping under the rhubarb for forty years, or why she had planted it so carefully on top.

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