Twin skulls forming a heart with floral ornament

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design of two human skulls mirrored to form the shape of a heart, with the eye sockets and teeth picked out in white against solid black. Fine engraved hatching shades the bone, and a black scroll and flower ornament sits below the join. The image is monochrome on a plain pale background, with no body part shown.

Skull Heart Flower Scrollwork Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cabin doors on the Mercy had been painted by my grandfather, and every spring someone had to scrape them back to bare elm before the new coat would hold. That was my job the year Tom came home off the Humber with no wages and a hand wrapped in a tea towel. He sat on the gunwale and watched me work, and neither of us mentioned the bank loan.

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We had argued about the design since we were boys. Tom wanted a horse, I wanted a gull. Dad said we could have whatever the panel would bear, which was one shape either side of the tiller. In the end it was two skulls drawn by the signwriter in Brentford who still owed Dad for a winch, set brow to brow so the gap between them made a heart. We added the scrollwork at the foot ourselves, and a small flower where the curls ran out, because Mum liked flowers and would have wanted something soft on the thing.

When the signwriter asked which of us would be the left-hand skull, Tom said he'd take whichever one faced the water. I said that was daft, they were the same, and he said that was the point.

He went back to the Humber in June. I finished the second coat alone, and the first evening the paint was dry, the low sun came through the lock gates and threw the white teeth of one face across the other, so for an hour the two of them looked as though they were talking. In September he came up the towpath with his hand healed and his bag on his shoulder. He didn't say anything about the doors. He just laid his palm flat over the little black flower at the join and kept it there until the lock below us filled.