Two black and grey skull tattoos on fingers, one skull wearing a top hat, with a bird and leafy vine on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Top hat skull finger tattoos

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, with a small skull tattoo on each of two fingers. The skull on the left finger wears a top hat, and the other skull has a simple outline and shaded details. On the back of the upper hand is a bird and a vine with leaves, drawn in black ink with grey shading.

Botanical Hand Skull Top hat Bird Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Carrow Gap would sell a top hat to Tobias Wren, so he sewed his own from a black fleece and wore it up the pass every market day. His brother Matthias cut headstones in the quarry below, and he could make a skull out of a pebble in one evening, grinning, with one eye set a little higher than the other. Tobias liked to sit on the wall outside the inn and tell travellers that death had good manners and a poor sense of weather.

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One winter the snow shut the pass for six weeks. The brothers had quarrelled over a debt of barley, and neither had gone down or up since the thaw before. In January the carter's boy came over the ridge with a parcel tied in string. Inside was a skull no bigger than a thimble, sitting in a nest of wool with a hat carved on its crown. Tobias wore it on his littlest finger beside the stove and did not sleep. In the morning he took his shears to the vine that had grown over the inn door since their mother's time, and he pricked its leaves onto the back of his hand with soot and a sewing needle, a small bird perched where the knuckles met.

When the pass opened in April, Matthias walked up in the thin sunshine with a second skull in his coat pocket. They met at the stile where the two paths join and neither said anything about barley. Matthias held out his hand, and Tobias held out his, and they clasped them the way people do when they are not yet sure of each other. The skulls touched across the knuckles, one wearing its tall black hat, and the carter's boy, watching from the wall, said afterwards that they looked like two old men trying to remember the same song.