Pencil drawing of a woman with closed eyes and long flowing hair holding a skull, surrounded by ribs, a spine and bones, with a soft yellow glow behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with skull and bones design

Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with her eyes closed and long hair that drifts through the composition, holding a human skull in one hand. Ribs, a spine and loose bones surround her and wrap around the figure, with the hair also tangled through them. The shading is soft graphite with fine hatching, and a pale yellow wash sits behind the figure, on a cream background with a thin border.

Woman Skull Bone Ribs Spine Long hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The function room at the Ashworth Arms smelled of carpet shampoo and warm prosecco, and Margit had already read every name badge on the table twice. Thirty years on, most of her year group had put on a stone or lost a hairline. She was looking for the ones who hadn't come, the way she used to check the register before the bell and count the gaps.

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Dev Hollis found her by the window. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, and that alone made her uneasy. "They're knocking the science block down in June," he said, and tipped the bag towards her. Inside, wrapped in a school jumper gone grey, was the skull they had taken from the bone cupboard in the fifth year, the one they'd named after Mrs Ormerod, the chemistry teacher who'd caught them with it. It was lighter than she remembered, and its empty sockets looked up at the ceiling tiles as if they had been waiting.

"You kept it," she said. "Kept it in your loft all this time." He shrugged. "The cupboard's going to a skip. I thought it should go somewhere we chose."

They went out to the car park in the drizzle, to the cherry tree by the bins where they had once sworn a blood oath with a paper clip. Dev dug with a trowel borrowed from the caretaker. Margit held the skull. Her hair had come half down in the damp, and the pins she'd pushed in that morning slid loose one by one and dropped into the wet grass around her shoes. She let them lie there. When the hole was deep enough she set Mrs Ormerod down in it, gently, and neither of them said anything at all.