Pencil drawing of a traditional-style tattoo design with a vintage microphone, dice, two skulls, a rose and an 8 ball, shown without any body placement.

Skulls, dice and microphone flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a vintage microphone above a horseshoe, two dice, and two sugar-skull style skulls with a rose between them. Smaller motifs include playing cards, diamonds, nautical stars, a numbered 13 on one skull, an 8 ball and a blank banner. The linework is clean with soft grey pencil shading, and the composition is a tall, centred stack on a white background.

Traditional Microphone Horseshoe Dice Skull Rose Playing card Diamond Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the club on Quay Street lost its power, Eddie Vance walked up the iron stairs with a dead man's dice in his coat and a horseshoe under his arm that had never once brought him luck. The stage lights died mid-verse. In the dark somebody laughed, and I knew it was Marlow, because nobody else in Harbour Row could laugh like a man who owed money to the sea.

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I had the old Shure on its stand, the one with the grille like a honeycomb, and I leaned into it anyway. Thirteen songs, Eddie used to say, was the number of rounds a man could survive before he started telling the truth. We were on the thirteenth. Out past the glass, the harbour lights bobbed like loose change, and the ace of spades was still sitting face up on the bar where Marlow had tossed it, as if it had something to say.

Eddie didn't sing. He rolled the dice across the piano lid, two little white cubes that came up double six, and then the lights came back on all at once, humming, and every bottle in the place caught fire with them. Marlow was gone. So was the money. The rose he'd left in the ashtray had already wilted, petal by petal, the way roses do when nobody is paying attention.

I still have the eight ball. It rolls off the shelf on wet nights, and I let it lie where it stops.