Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull emerging from swirling smoke, shaded across a forearm against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Smoke and skull tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull with deep eye sockets and a grimacing jaw is partly wrapped in wisps of smoke that curl up and around the top of the design. The soft, blended shading moves from near-black in the shadows to pale grey highlights, giving the skull a three-dimensional form. The image is a close, vertical crop of the limb on a dark background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Skull Smoke Flame

Find an artist for this

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

Pour that tea before it goes cold on you. No, leave the biscuits, they're for the night sister. You asked why I won't go down to the boiler house after midnight, and I'll tell you, though you'll think me soft in the head.

Keep reading

Back in the old wing, when they still burned coal for the whole site, there was a stoker called Alfie Brandt who worked the furnace alone from ten till six. He smoked roll-ups down there, which the rules forbade, and the smoke would hang under the ceiling in long grey ropes, curling round the pipes as if it had somewhere to be. One February the ropes started to take a shape. Alfie swore to me it was a face, a skull with its jaw dropped open as though it had been holding something in for a hundred years. The smoke rose up around it and licked at the crown of it like flame that had forgotten how to be hot.

He laughed it off until the Tuesday Marjorie Fell came down to fetch him for a burns case on Ward Four. She found the furnace door hanging open, the shovel laid neat across the floor, and no sign of Alfie except his cap, sat on the top step with the smoke above it, thick and slow, drifting towards the stairs as though something was drawing it up. They never found him. Marjorie kept that cap in her locker until the day she retired.

So I don't go down after midnight. Some nights I see the grey coming up through the grating, curling round the top of the stairs, and I say good evening to it, just to be polite. Finish your tea now. The lift's making that noise again, and I'd rather you didn't hear what it says.