Black and grey tribal tattoo with a skull-like face and small red accents on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal skull on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bold tribal design shows a skull-like face with red eyes, surrounded by sweeping black shapes that extend down the arm. The linework is heavy with solid black fills and grey shading that gives the shapes depth. Red ink appears only in small areas, so black and grey dominate the composition.

Upper arm Tribal Skull Swirl Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hosking kept the boarding house above the harbour at Porthgwidden, and she kept the back room locked because of what came ashore with the spring tides. The first thing was a plank of black oak with a face worked into it, all sweeping cheeks and hollow brow, the eyes filled with red lead where the paint had survived the water. Her husband said it was a figurehead off some Spanish wreck. She hung it in the scullery anyway, because she did not like to burn good wood.

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The lodgers never stayed past the week. A clerk from Truro complained that the face watched him eat, and a widow slept with her boots on. Mrs Hosking only shrugged and set out the bread. What she did not say was that every night the tide came up the steps a little further, the black weed on the lintel curling like flames, and every morning the scullery floor was wet.

In the eleventh winter her daughter Ann, who had never been afraid of anything, carried the plank up to the cliff and asked it plainly what it wanted. Nobody saw what passed between them on the headland, but the gulls went quiet, and by morning the red had gone from the carved eyes, leaving two pale hollows the sea had drunk.

Mrs Hosking hung the plank back in the scullery and never locked the back room again. The bread still goes out at six, and nobody sleeps with their boots on.