Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with three skulls, roses and banners reading see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, in realistic greyscale shading.

Three skulls with roses and see, hear, speak no evil banners

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing three skulls arranged in a cluster, with a rose at each corner and three curled banners. The banners read "See no evil", "Hear no evil" and "Speak no evil" in script lettering. The skulls and roses are shaded in soft graphite with strong contrast and detail, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Realism Traditional Skull Rose Banner Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The caretaker at Ashdown House kept three things in his bottom drawer: a tin of old pennies, a torch that had never worked, and a cassette with three phrases biroed across the label. I found it in the summer I was fourteen, when the lift had been dead since May and Mum sent me up nine floors with the shopping in two carrier bags that cut into my fingers. Nobody on the estate would tell me what the tape was for. Ask Mr Pell, they said, and he'll tell you to mind your own business.

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Mr Pell lived on the ground floor by the bins with his door propped open all day, which I took for friendliness until I understood it was a watch. He saw the lads from block C pass parcels through the railings. He heard Mrs Oyelaran shouting at her boy through the kitchen vent, and he heard the panda car idle outside and pull away without anyone knocking. He said nothing to any of them. When I asked about the cassette he turned it over in his big hands and said it wasn't a warning. It was a record of who had been in the building.

The week the lift was finally fixed, he came up the stairs behind me, which he had never done, and pressed the cassette into my palm. He wouldn't say why, only that a building forgets its own history if nobody keeps it moving. Then he went back down and shut his door, and for the first time in my life I heard nothing at all from behind it.

That night I played the tape on my brother's old machine. It was mostly hiss, nine minutes of the estate breathing, a child laughing somewhere far below, and under all of it a man counting slowly, as if he were keeping score for someone who would never ask.