Skull and Crossbones Coloring Page

The oldest skull design of all, drawn clean and symmetrical. A broad cranium sits front and center with its eye sockets and nasal opening filled in solid, which is what makes the emblem readable from across a room and the reason it has been inked that way for three hundred years. A wide row of teeth runs beneath, and two long bones cross in an X behind the jaw with all four knobbed ends drawn in full on the paper. Every bone shaft is left open with just a line or two of shading detail. This mark went up on pirate flags, then onto poison bottles, and it survives on both because it needs no words to work. That makes it an easy page to color and a hard one to color interestingly. The usual route is bone white on black, which you can get by filling the paper around the design instead of the design itself. A warmer treatment, ivory bones with the background left plain, suits a younger colorist better and takes five minutes.