Traditional style tattoo of a skull with a mountain, pine trees, sun and clouds on the top of its head, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional skull with mountain scene on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A skull fills the lower part of the design, with a mountain range, pine trees, a rising sun, clouds and small stars above it. The bold black outlines, grey shading and decorative band across the skull's crown are typical of traditional tattooing. Warm yellow, red and green accents sit against grey and black, and the two-panel composition shows the whole piece and a close-up of the skull.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, son, and don't touch that ladle till I say so. Pete Haddow never let a man have a second bowl until he'd named a mountain he'd stood on. Forty years cooking on herring boats, and he swore he'd seen a hundred mountains, every one of them at the bottom of a tin mug.

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The winter the Brightwater took the long haul north, a deckhand called Wren asked him what the sun looked like coming up over land. Pete said it looked like a cracked yolk stuck to a grey sky. Wren laughed and said he'd been born under a mountain in Glen Shiel and would paint one on the galley bulkhead to prove it. So he did, with a stub of red lead and a tin of ochre, peaks and pines and all. Pete scrubbed it off every Sunday with carbolic soap, and every Monday it came back, because Wren had mixed the paint with fish oil.

Then the storm came off Rockall and the boat lay on her side for two days. When the sea finally flattened, the men crawled up on deck and found the wheelhouse gone, the skipper's pipe in the scuppers, and Wren sitting on a coil of rope, staring at the bulkhead, which was the only thing aboard still dry. Pete put a bowl in his hands and told him to name it. Wren looked at the sun breaking through the cloud, then at the painted peak, and said, Ben Mhor, because that's where my mother's kettle lives. Pete filled the second bowl without a word.

The boat went down off Stornoway in fifty-two, bowls and bulkhead and all. But I still reckon Wren's the only man who ever earned his supper.

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