Black linework tattoo of a woman's face with an elaborate bun hairstyle, beside a small skull and crossbones, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait and skull on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bold black outline tattoo showing a stylised woman's face with a looped, textured bun hairstyle and heavy brows. A small skull and crossbones sits to the lower right, with a tiny mark beneath it. The black and white image is framed tightly on the arm against a dark sleeve, with the designs clearly centred.

Upper arm Woman Portrait Face Hair bun Skull Crossbones

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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

You climb the wall at Harrowmere where the ivy has done the masonry's work for it, because the gate chain has rusted to its post and the estate agent swore nobody had been up here since the flood of 1931. The solar is open to the sky on one side. In it, a woman hangs above the cold hearth, her hair wound into a heavy, looped bun, her brows drawn together as if someone has just told her the rent is late. You have seen that face before. It is in the margin of your survey notes, where you have been doodling it all week without knowing why.

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Beneath the portrait, scratched into the lintel of a bricked-up door, is a small skull with crossed bones, and a row of tiny strokes beneath it. Mrs Ottley at the village shop told you the smugglers who used the cellars marked their doors that way, and that the last person who went down there came back up talking to the walls. You kneel and copy the mark into your notebook, pressing hard, the way a child copies a word she is afraid of misspelling. The strokes number eleven. The twelfth has been started and never finished.

Behind you the wall gives a small dry crack, the sound of stone settling after a century of weather. You do not turn around at once. You count the strokes again, eleven, and notice that the portrait's mouth, which was open when you came in, is shut tight now, as if it has been holding its breath for the twelfth. You take out your pencil. It seems rude not to finish the mark.