Three photos of a tan and black treasure map tattoo with a compass rose, red cross, skull and crossed swords, scrollwork and the script Not all treasure is silver and gold, on the upper chest.

Treasure map with skull and script on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a parchment-style treasure map with a red compass star, a red cross, a skull above crossed swords and dotted route lines, framed by black scrollwork. The script above reads Not all treasure is silver and gold, and the map is filled with soft tan and grey shading. Three photos show the design from different angles, with a healed view of the upper chest at the lower right.

Chest Compass rose Skull Scrollwork Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had not lifted off the lower field in nine days, and Ada Penrose went out before light with a spade over her shoulder and her brother's old lantern swinging from one hand. The map was in the tin under the hen-house step, wrapped in oilcloth, where her grandfather had told her it would be if the farm ever came to need it. He had drawn it himself on the back of a feed sack in the year the mill closed, with a red star for the compass and a little cross where the spring ran under the wall, and a skull with two crossed swords over the place he called the bone pit, which was only a dip in the ground where the sheep had died one bad winter.

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She followed the dotted line past the gate, past the stump of the lightning ash, and stopped where the wall bent like an elbow. The ground there sounded hollow under the spade. Her brother Tam would have laughed at her, and her mother would have told her to come in and eat, and the bank in Ross had already sent its second letter about the rent. Ada dug anyway, her breath going up in clouds, until the blade rang on iron.

What she pulled out was a cracked crock with a wax seal, and inside it, under a folded note in her grandfather's careful hand, a row of tarnished spoons, a christening cup, and her mother's wedding ring, which had gone missing the summer before and been blamed on the dog. The note said only: Not all treasure is silver and gold. Mind the wall.

Ada sat back on her heels in the frost and laughed until the lantern guttered. Then she took the ring, put it on, and carried the rest of the crock home in her arms like a sleeping child.