Stippled green and teal line drawing of a zombie skull with swept-back hair and a jaw hanging open, shown as a tattoo design with no placement on the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Zombie skull with swept hair

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A zombie-style skull with swept-back hair, a partly exposed jaw, and green bolts or staples at the temple, eye and mouth. The linework is bold with fine dotwork stippling for shading, and fine dots and splatters trail off to the left. The design is drawn in two tones of green and dark teal on a plain white background.

Dotwork Skull Zombie Hair Splatter Dot

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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

The head arrived on a Thursday in a carrier bag, wrapped in the Sunday paper and smelling of the canal. Mr Pardoe, who had run the chair nearest the window of Pardoe & Son since the Coronation, unwrapped it on the marble counter and told me to comb it before the four o'clock regulars came in. I was fourteen. I did as I was told.

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The hair was real enough, thick and black and swept back in a wave that would have made a bookie jealous, but the face underneath had been put together from spare parts. Green iron bolts pinned the temple where the plaster had cracked, one sat in the socket where an eye should have been, and two more held the jaw on with a rattle I could hear whenever I brushed the fringe. Mr Pardoe called it the Gentleman. He said a man who was dead could still have a decent parting.

The regulars came and went, and none of them asked about the head. Mrs Ogden from the bakery sat in the chair and watched it in the mirror, and the head watched back through its one good eye. That night, after the shutters came down, I heard the jaw click open and shut from the back room, slow as a clock. I went in with a torch and found the bolts glinting in the dark and the comb lying on the floor, set down neatly, the way Mr Pardoe left his scissors.

In the morning he was already sweeping. He lifted the head, set it on the windowsill facing the street, and said the Gentleman had been waiting a long time for a proper cut. I never learned who he had bought it from. What I learned was that the best barbers keep their blades sharp and their customers, living or otherwise, sitting very still.