Black and grey pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing two skulls wrapped in dollar bills, with banners reading EVIL PAYS FOR and EVIL WAY, shown without a body placement.

Skulls and dollar bills with banner design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencilled tattoo design of two skulls emerging from folded dollar bills, with smoke curling between them. Two banners wrap around the composition, carrying the words EVIL PAYS FOR and EVIL WAY in block lettering. The work uses detailed hatching and soft grey shading on a plain background, with no colour.

Neo-trad Skull Dollar bill Banner Smoke Lettering Money

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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

You want the Dunning brothers, then sit down and mind the hot towel, because I only tell it the once. This was 1952 in Calder Falls, where the only paved road ran past the feed store and the Methodist church had a bigger bell than congregation. Lyle and Ray Dunning were the sort who could smell a fast dollar through a closed door. They got into the counterfeit line the way other boys got into the rodeo, all show and no sense.

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They printed tens and hundreds in their mother's washhouse, cutting a copper plate they'd lifted from a pawnshop tray and inking it with boot blacking. Hap Corliss took their first fifty to settle a debt he owed the bank, and he never once held it up to the light. Nobody does. Money is a thing folks agree not to look at too closely, and the Dunnings counted on that agreement the way a preacher counts on Sunday.

Ray got greedy. He took a fat sheaf of notes to the auction at Hollis Gap, and Orrin Bell, the deputy who collected pocket watches and kept them all ticking in his shirt, noticed the bills had a faint scorch at the edges. The washhouse stove had been burning them for kindling, you see, the way the boys burned every bad note they could not spend. Bell followed the smell of it home.

Ray walked out of the county jail in '54 with a cough and a new hat. Lyle never walked out of anywhere. They buried him under a stone that says FAITHFUL SON, and folks still talk about the Dunnings as fine boys who fell in with the wrong crowd. My mother had her own saying about that kind of boy. Evil pays, she'd say, and then it sends the bill.