Black and grey realism tattoo of a spider whose abdomen is a human skull, placed on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spider with skull body on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large spider tattoo has a skull forming its abdomen, with the legs spreading outwards across the skin. The linework is bold and the skull and body are shaded in soft greys to create a three-dimensional effect. The image is in black and grey and is framed closely on the upper arm and shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Spider Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came off the Lincoln train on a wet Tuesday in October, stencilled with a shipper's name none of us had heard of, and by Thursday my uncle Walt had the back room of the Co-op pulled apart looking for whatever had got into the cotton bales. Walt caught rats for the rural council and believed he understood everything that scuttled. He did not understand this.

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It sat in the middle of a bale like a bishop on a cushion, its legs spread wider than my two hands, its body a skull no bigger than a walnut. Not a human skull, though my stomach hoped so for a moment. A cat's, I thought, the jaw neatly hinged, the eye sockets deep and dark, and someone had cleaned it with more care than most folk give their teeth. Walt raised the rolled-up newspaper above his head. I stopped him with my palm flat against his wrist.

'It's only a spider,' he said. 'And a long way from home.'

'So are we,' I said, which was the wrong thing, and he looked at me as if I'd spoken in French. We carried the bale out to the yard instead. By morning the rain had softened the label to pulp, and the spider had strung a fine silver sheet across the mouth of the jam jar I'd put it in, holding the dew like a windowpane.

Walt wanted it burned. I wanted to keep it. We settled on a compromise, which in our house meant I won, and I still feed it a bluebottle on Sundays and watch the skull turn toward the lamp, slow as a church clock.