Why I Read Tarot and love a skull

People ask me the same question about the skulls more than anything else I make. Isn't that a bit dark?

To me, it isn't, and I've had years to work out why. Here's where it actually comes from.

Don't fear Death

I read Tarot. Not professionally, just for myself, and it's shaped how I think about a lot of what ends up in my collections. The card people fear most is Death, and it's also the one they misread most. Draw it in a reading and it almost never means someone is going to die. Fortune tellers have been explaining that to nervous clients for centuries: it means an ending, and an ending clears space for something else. Victorian sideshows understood exactly how much power a symbol like that holds when it's unsettling and honest in the same breath. I think the skull works the same way in jewellery. It gets a reaction before it gets an explanation, and the explanation is usually the more interesting part.

The warning that isn't really a warning

The oldest version of this goes back to Rome. As the story survives, a general returning from battle in full triumph, adored by the entire city, had a slave behind him whose only job was to say one thing in his ear. Memento mori. Remember that you will die. Whether that exact scene played out at every triumph or has grown a little in the telling over two thousand years, the point behind it never needed the details to be perfect. Glory doesn't last. You're only here for a while, so the story goes, get on with it.

Shakespeare understood the same thing and gave it to Hamlet in a graveyard, holding the skull of a man he'd loved as a child. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. It isn't a prop in that scene. It's a reckoning. A few decades either side of Shakespeare, Dutch and Flemish painters were putting the same idea into still life paintings, a skull sitting among wine, flowers and open books to remind anyone looking at it that none of what's pictured outlasts them. Different centuries, same nudge.

When love doesn't end

The Victorians took that warning and turned it into something closer to devotion. Mourning jewellery, often set with a lock of hair or a tiny portrait, was worn openly as proof that love had outlived the person it belonged to. Skulls sat next to hearts on the same rings, because to a Victorian, grief and love weren't separate stories. Queen Victoria wore mourning dress for forty years after Prince Albert died. Hopefully it got washed every now and then.

The calavera

Mexican tradition takes the whole symbol and flips it. The calavera, the decorated skull that turns up on altars, in face paint, in sugar and silver for Día de los Muertos, isn't there to grieve. It's there to welcome the dead home for one night. Life and death share the same table. Out of everything I've read about how different cultures have handled the skull, this is the one built purely around joy, and it's the one I think about most when someone tells me they find skull jewellery morbid.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die

By the time punk got hold of the skull, most of that history had been stripped out and only the attitude was left. Vivienne Westwood's shop on the Kings Road went from Let It Rock to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, using skulls everywhere, before it became SEX and then Seditionaries. The philosophy fell away. What was left was a fast way to say you stood outside the mainstream on purpose. That part of the story is real too. It just belongs to a different century than the rest of it.

The most expensive version ever made

In 2007 Damien Hirst put 8,601 diamonds on a platinum skull, including a 52.4 carat pink diamond set in the forehead, and called it For the Love of God. It was reported at the time as the most expensive work ever made by a living artist, priced at £50 million. He'd spent decades circling mortality by then, and this was the most literal version he ever made of it: the most extreme wealth anyone knows how to produce, wrapped around the one thing none of it can buy its way out of. It's worth sitting with the question that leaves you. Cover death in the most valuable material on earth, and does it get less frightening, or does the fear just get more expensive to look at?

Where that leaves me

Every one of those histories agrees on the same thing in the end. Wearing a skull isn't dark. It's a decision to carry a reminder on your body instead of leaving it in a book somewhere, to remember what actually matters, and to stop collecting the things that don't.

You can see where that thinking lands in the Skulls collection, made by hand in my studio in Hastings and hallmarked at the London Assay Office.