Two side-by-side tattoo flash drawings: a skull with a wrapped bone-like form above it, and a skeletal hand, both in a neo-traditional style with watercolour washes and black splatter.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two skeletal bone designs with ink splatter

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

Two separate design drawings on pale paper. The left shows a skull with a bone-like shape wrapped in cloth at the top, and the right shows a skeletal hand with splayed fingers. Both use dark outline linework with soft pink and blue watercolour washes and scattered black ink spots.

Neo-trad Skull Bone Skeleton Hand Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie,

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The parcel from the 6.40 Carlisle is still on the top shelf of left luggage, and nobody has come for it in nine weeks, so I have decided it is mine in all but name. It is a flat box tied with brown string, labelled only 'For Mr Ashdown, to be called for'. Inside, wrapped in a silk scarf gone the colour of weak tea, is a skull, sheep or small deer, with its jaw still hinged on by a bit of gristle. I have taken to keeping it company on my tea break.

Dennis, the porter, says it is bad luck to keep a dead thing in the office. I told him it has been dead longer than either of us has worked here and has never once complained. Then on Tuesday a gentleman came in asking after a box with a hand in it, drawn rather than carved, he said, with blue wash like river water and black speckles like soot off an engine. The originals had gone astray in the post from Leeds, and he wanted the parcel back.

So I unwrapped the scarf properly and found two sheets folded between the skull and the cardboard. One is the skull, the other a hand reaching upward, fingers splayed as if to catch a train already gone. Pink washes sit where blood would be, if there were any. I held them under the lamp and thought of Father lifting us onto the wall at the end of the platform to watch the expresses go through, how he said the line was only a long pencil drawing the engines kept rubbing out.

I have written to the address on the sheet. If Mr Ashdown does not come by Friday I will post the skull to him myself, scarf and all, and keep the hand, since it seems only fair that one of us should get to wave at the trains.

Love, Edith