Colour tattoo of red stage curtains, a skull and a Fall Out Boy banner on the back of a calf.

Stage curtain and skull banner on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on the calf shows a skull and a top hat framed by pink and red stage curtains, with a yellow banner across the top reading Fall Out Boy. The linework is bold with soft grey and black shading, and pink, red and yellow ink add colour against the grey tones. The design fills the calf in a rounded, centred composition.

Calf Skull Banner Top hat Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had belonged to the Pennywhistle Travelling Players since before anyone in the company could remember, and Ambrose Tull kept it in a hatbox under the prompt table. Every night before the curtain rose he lifted the lid, checked the yellowed teeth were still in place, and set his top hat on top of it like a lid on a pot. 'Old Yorick keeps the house,' he told the new girls, and none of them ever asked who Yorick had been.

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The night the pier theatre at Saltcombe went dark mid-scene, the rope for the red curtains jammed in the flies. Nell Greaves, who had swept the boards for three seasons and never once been let near the ropes, climbed the iron ladder with a torch clamped in her teeth. The audience of four hundred stamped and whistled. Below, Tull stood in the wings with the hatbox open at his feet, and when she shouted down that the line had knotted round a cleat, he only nodded and said, 'Then we'll do it without the curtain.'

He walked out into the lamp glare with the skull cradled against his chest and his hat tipped back. He talked to it about the sea, about the rent, about the girl who had run off with a conjuror from Blackpool, and the house roared at every line. Then he set the skull on the footlights, bowed low, and the gilt banner above the proscenium caught the light so the old words shone for a moment before the lamps went out.

Nell untied the knot at dawn, alone on the pier, and found the hat still on the boards where he had left it, the skull gone with him. The curtains hung open for the rest of the season. Nobody in the company ever mended the rope.