Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a winged skull with crossed daggers and a flame on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged skull with crossed daggers on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A winged skull sits at the centre of the design, with a flame rising above it and crossed daggers beneath. Bold black outlines define the wings, skull and blades, with light grey shading on the bone and feathers. The emblem fills the frame across the upper arm against a plain skin background.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Wing Dagger Flame Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had worked the knife-throwing booth for eleven seasons and had never once been allowed to touch the wheel. Dessie Marr kept it in the back of the blue lorry under a tarpaulin, and the emblem painted on its lid was the only thing about the Marr Brothers Travelling Fair that strangers remembered: a skull with its wings spread, two daggers crossed beneath, and a small flame licking up from the crown as if someone had struck a match on the bone.

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It was August, the field outside Kettering smelling of diesel and fried onions, when Dessie brought her a tin of paint and asked her to touch up the lid. The sun had lifted the old colour in curls. "Get the flame right," he said. "My father did the flame himself. He said it was the bit people looked at."

She worked three nights under a bare bulb, feathering grey into the bone and blacking the blade edges until they looked sharp enough to cut the light. On the last night she found a second set of initials scratched under the hinge, with a date from before she was born. She showed Dessie. He studied it for a long time, then took the rag from her hand and wiped the brush clean.

"Dad was on the gate the night the big wheel came down," he said quietly. "Two men under it and one of them was his brother. He painted the skull after, so we'd have something to look at other than the ground." He closed the lid and pressed the catch. "Make the flame bright. We pull out at first light."

At dawn the lorry rolled past the hedgerows with the emblem facing the road, and Nell, watching from the step of her caravan, saw the flame catch the sun as it came over the fields.