Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing stacked skulls framed by tribal-style swirls and linework on a white background.

Stacked skulls tribal design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows several skulls stacked vertically, with a larger skull at the lower centre and smaller skulls at the upper and side positions. Flowing tribal-style linework, curled swirls and two shaded spheres fill the spaces around them. The design is rendered in grey graphite pencil with soft shading on the skulls and spheres, set on a plain off-white background.

Skull Swirl Tribal pattern Orb

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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

Hold your tea still, Maggie, the rails are talking tonight. Three of them stacked up on the signal gantry at Carrow Junction, one above the other, the way the masons carved them on the station arch before the bombs took the roof. Nobody cut that arch to look pretty. It was a warning to the drivers: the line past the third bridge belongs to the dead, and the dead want their fares paid.

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Ned Quiller was the stationmaster's boy in the winter of 1931, and he thought a ghost was a thing you could argue with. He stood on the platform with a lantern and a ledger, and when the nine-forty stopped short of the platform with no engine behind it, he walked straight up to the cab and asked the driver for his ticket. The driver said he had none. Ned wrote that down. Then he took the coins from the mourners' tin and laid them on the rail, one by one, the way his mother had taught him to lay out pennies for the ferryman.

The engine moved on at dawn. Ned never boarded it. The ledger has his name in it for every night since, always in a clean hand, always with the same entry: fare received, one soul, passed through.

Mind the gap, love. Some of them are still waiting for their turn to go.