Black and grey thigh tattoo of two animal skulls, a poppy and an anatomical heart inside an ornate oval frame, with dotwork and geometric shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skulls, poppy and heart in an oval frame

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

An ornate oval frame with filigree scrolls encloses two animal skulls stacked one above the other, a poppy flower with dotted centre, and an anatomical heart at the base. The linework is fine and sketchy, with solid black areas, geometric hatching and stippled dotwork filling the skulls and petals. The design is rendered entirely in black ink and grey tones, with a few faint red lines barely visible across the lower left, and it is shown on the outer thigh.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dr Ambrose Tull had been cataloguing the ship's cargo of bones since Madeira, and by the time the Halcyon raised the Cape the cabin smelled of lye and clove oil. He wrapped the fox skull in flannel, then the smaller goat's, and fitted them into the oval mahogany frame he had carried from Bristol with its glass removed, so the dead could look out across the swell. The brass scrolls had cost him two shillings in Funchal and a good deal of patience.

Keep reading

The heart was the difficult part. He had no fresh one, and the wax model from the medical chest had a crack along the left ventricle that no amount of beeswax would hide. So he drew it instead, slowly, in the lamplight, hatching the chambers with a steel nib until the lines looked like the grain of split oak. Beneath it he laid a poppy pressed flat in a psalter, its pod dried to a brown cup, the seeds inside rattling whenever the floor tilted.

Jonah Harrow, the second mate, came in with a lantern and a question about the rum ration and stayed to look at the frame. 'What's it for, Doctor?' Tull considered the dotwork petals, the stippled dark where the poppy's centre should be. 'For the Admiralty, if they ask what the sea takes from a man. For my sister, if she never does.' Harrow laughed, then saw the thin red line Tull had run through the lower corner, and stopped.

Tull hung the frame on the bulkhead above his bunk, where the lantern could reach it. Through the night the ship rolled and the skulls seemed to swing a little toward the red thread, as though they had finally found something to follow home.

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