Black and grey shaded skull tattoo on a finger of a clenched hand, shown in two side-by-side photos, with a cigarette placed beside it in the right-hand image.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small skull tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show the same small skull tattoo on the side of a finger, with the hand clenched and resting on a dark surface. The skull is rendered in soft grey shading with darker outlines and tonal detail in the eye sockets and teeth. The left image shows the tattoo alone, while the right image includes a cigarette held against the finger beside it.

Hand Skull Finger Cigarette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobiah,

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The bells at Harrowgate have gone quiet since the old Queen's funeral, and the men who rang them have taken to the taverns on Saltgate Row, where they wager on everything. Your cousin Wenna asked me to tell you she has not forgiven you for the bet on the ferryman's daughter, and that she is keeping your share of the pig.

Something stranger happened on Tuesday. A carter came through the east gate with a bandaged hand, and when the warden unwrapped the linen there was a skull inked on the second finger, no bigger than a barley grain. The surgeon-smith Mabbot swore it was the work of the Lantern Brothers, who were hanged for forgery under the old king. Nobody in the guardhouse could say why a grown man would pay good silver to have death sitting on his knuckle, but the warden said it was the sort of vanity the drowned men of the marsh always had.

I went down to the cellars with a candle to see the thing for myself. The ink had faded to the grey of wet ash, and the tiny teeth were picked out in darker lines, every one of them. Beside it, someone had left a tobacco roll on the stone sill, burnt down to a stub. I thought of the Lantern Brothers and how they laughed at their own gallows.

Come home before the thaw, Tobiah. The river is rising and the salt-wives say the drowned are walking again, though I have only seen the carter and the boy.

Yours in the grey, Ada