Black flash design of two skulls with cross and heart eyes above a red dripping heart crossed by a red line, with the words RAGE and LOVE, shown without a body placement.

Twin skulls and dripping heart with RAGE LOVE text

Mixed · Flash

Two solid black skulls sit above a red outlined heart that drips at its edges, with a vertical and a horizontal red line passing through it. The skulls have white cross and heart shapes for eyes, and the words RAGE and LOVE in rough black lettering sit either side of the heart. The design is shown in black and red on a plain white background with bold, simple shapes.

Skull Heart Cross Lettering Love Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had kept the bones for thirty years and had never once asked the dead what they had quarrelled about. So when the two skulls came up from the weir in a sack of wet reeds, I only read the tag the bailiff had tied to them: Anselm and Piers, twins of the Fennick mill, burned out in the spring. Abbot Hugh wanted them cleaned and set in the charnel before the Michaelmas visitors arrived, and so the task fell to me, as it always did.

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The village said the twins had hated each other from the cradle. They fought over a mare, a girl at the fair, the position of a sluice gate. When the mill went up, each swore the other had struck the flint, and neither would kneel in the chapel to say otherwise. Their mother, the bailiff said, had sat between their beds every night for a month so they could not reach across.

Someone had been at the skulls before the bailiff's men. In the left socket of one, a cross had been pressed into the soot with a thumbnail, and in the right socket of the other, a heart, shaky and small, as if a child had made it. I sat with them through the vespers bell, turning them over in my lap, and I could not tell whether the cross was a curse or a prayer or simply the first mark a frightened sister could reach.

I did not scrub the marks away. I took the red sealing wax from the abbot's desk, warmed it over my candle, and let it run down the shelf in one thin drip beside the heart, then laid the skulls facing each other on the stone, close enough that their brows nearly touched. The visitors came and saw nothing strange. Only I knew the wax had not been meant to hold anything together, and yet it had.