Black and grey tattoo of stacked skulls and skeletons with a knife, shaded and detailed, on the upper arm.

Stacked skulls and skeletons with a knife on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three skulls stacked over one another, with a skeleton's ribcage and arm bones framing them, and a knife blade running diagonally across the centre. One skull wears a bandana or cap, and another has a hand gripping the knife handle. The work uses fine linework and smooth grey shading to create depth, with no colour ink.

Upper arm Skull Skeleton Bone Ribcage Knife Bandana Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knife had lived in a biscuit tin on Nan's windowsill for longer than anyone could remember, wrapped in a tea towel that smelled of Brasso. Nobody played for it. That was the rule the Tuesday lads had agreed in 1974, when Walter Fenn lost his allotment to a pair of kings and went home sober for the first time in a decade.

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By the third Tuesday of March the game had narrowed to Ray Oddie and Stan Bickerton, and the kitchen had gone quiet enough to hear the kettle ticking as it cooled. Ray kept his bandana knotted at the back of his head, the way he had worn it since the docks closed, and he stacked his chips in three neat towers, one on another, as if he meant to knock them down himself. Stan wanted the knife. Ray wanted Stan to say why.

Nan dealt the last hand from behind her reading glasses. Ray turned over a jack of spades and the clock on the cooker was suddenly the loudest thing in Yorkshire. Stan opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. He lifted the knife by its worn wooden grip, the way his mother had taught him, and laid it back in the tin without a word. Ray pocketed his winnings in coppers and went home whistling.

Nan wrapped the tin in its towel and set it back on the sill, where the morning light caught the blade and made it look, for once, like something that had finally been put down.