Digital illustration of a skull covered in red tribal patterns, beside a vertical strip of skulls, crossbones and tribal flames on a dark textured background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal skull with red patterns and crossbones

Mixed · Flash

A large skull in three-quarter profile fills the left side of the image, its bone surface decorated with red tribal scrollwork. A vertical border on the right repeats small skulls, crossed bones and red tribal flame motifs. The shading is soft and rendered, set against a dark brown, textured background.

Skull Tribal Crossbones Flame Pattern

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the pump again, so you break the ice on the trough with the back of a hoe while Mrs Pell's dog watches from the gate. Your breath hangs in front of you. Behind you the barn door groans on its one good hinge, and you go in for the lamp oil and find the old chest shoved against the hay bales, the one nobody at Carrow Farm has opened since your grandfather died.

Keep reading

Inside, under sacking and a rope of onion skins, lies a board of dark oak, bone-pale where the varnish has worn away. Painted across it in faded red are scrolls and flames that curl back into themselves. Down one edge runs a column of small skulls, each with crossed bones beneath it like a signature. You hold the lamp close. Your grandmother once told you the red was pokeberry juice boiled with alum for cloth, and that it outlasts most things people mean to keep.

Under the board is a folded lambing ledger, its pages stiff with damp. Your grandfather's columns are tidy until the winter of the flood, when the entries change. Beside each lost ewe he has drawn a tiny skull, and beside the rams a pair of crossed bones. On the last page, in pencil pressed hard enough to tear the paper, he has written that the flames are for the ones who came back. You read it twice. The wind shifts and the barn door bangs open onto the white yard, and you realise you have been holding your breath the way he must have done every February.

You carry the board to the kitchen and lean it against the range. As the stove warms, the red scrolls seem to lift off the bone, slow and patient, the way fire moves in a grate. You do not put the ledger back. You fill the kettle, and when the frost finally lets go of the step, you go out to see to the ewes.