Black and grey realism style skull tattoo on the upper arm, with a maroon top and part of a shoulder in view.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small skull on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small skull is tattooed on the upper arm, drawn from a front-facing view with the teeth and jaw shown in detail. Soft grey shading models the cranium, while darker ink fills the eye sockets and nasal cavity to give the skull depth. The pale skin, maroon top and light textured background sit around the tattoo, which is placed centrally on the arm.

Realism Upper arm Skull

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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

The skull came up out of the wet ground behind the Hollins orchard in the third week of August, when the windfalls were going soft under the trees and the wasps had found them first. Ada Penrose, who had drawn birds for the county museum for thirty years, was sent for because the farmer's boy would not touch it.

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She knelt on a feed sack in the grass and turned it over with a pencil. A fox, she decided after a while, or a badger, the jaw too neat for a rat. Someone had wired a tin tag through one eye socket, stamped with a name she didn't know and a year she did: 1931. That was the spring the orchard had been planted, by a man who wanted his sons to stay put.

She drew it that afternoon at the kitchen table with the window open on the sound of apples dropping. Grey for the dome of it, the way the light lay along the cheekbone. Black only where the sockets went back into nothing. The boy watched from the doorway and asked whether it had been a person. She said it had been a fox, and that the difference mattered less than people supposed.

When the drawing was finished she pinned it above the sink. The next morning it was gone, and she found the boy halfway up the lane with his cap pulled low, carrying the bone in both hands. He had buried it under the old Bramley and left the picture nailed to the gatepost, weighted with a windfall, so that the wasps could have the rest.