Black and grey realism tattoo of two stacked skulls with a ribcage and skeletal hand on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skulls and skeleton ribcage on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two human skulls are stacked one above the other, with a skeletal ribcage and bony hand curling across the lower part of the arm. The linework is detailed and the shading is smooth and realistic, using heavy darks in the eye sockets and bone recesses. The image is shown in black and white against a blurred background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Skull Skeleton Ribcage Hand Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The whistle at Dunmere goes at half five, and by the time you have the kettle on your mother has set two bait tins on the table, one for you and one for the lamp-room boy who lodges upstairs. You are sixteen and think yourself a man. Your father has been underground since the lower gallery flooded, and he likes to say the roof speaks before it falls, a low groan like a cow in a far field. He says you can hear the mountain think if you keep quiet long enough.

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Nobody goes into the Llanfair dip any more. The old hands at the Institute say the pit keeps what it takes, and that the men it took in the flood were laid together at the bottom of the dip because nobody could carry them out. On the Saturday your father takes you down with a borrowed lamp to fetch the one Tomos Vaughan left hanging on a timber. The water comes up to your shins and the air tastes of iron. Then the beam swings across the wall and there they are: two skulls stacked one above the other like men sharing a bed, ribs folded round them like a shawl, and a bony hand curled over the lot as if it had been holding on to something in the dark.

Your father does not speak for a long while. Then he takes off his cap and says Tomos and his brother Dai went down the same shift, and that Dai always swore he would not let his brother go alone. You want to say that is only a story, that bones tell nothing, but the hand is there and the lamp in your fist shakes so badly the flame jumps. You understand, without anyone saying it, that the pit does not keep what it takes so much as whatever refuses to let go.

You carry the lamp home in both hands. That night you set it on the sill facing the pit-head, where the wheel is still turning, and leave it burning until your mother comes down and asks who it is for. You tell her it is for the two who did not come up. She says nothing, only turns the wick a little higher.