Manifesto
Manifesto
A skull is not decoration. It is an object of memory.
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The Dutch still-life painters set one beside an hourglass and a cut flower to say something plain: what remains matters more than what shines. Three hundred years later the image has lost none of its precision. It needs no glow, no gradient, no caption.
3SKULLS takes those images — woodcuts, etchings, anatomical plates — and prints them on cotton. The motif stands on its own. We do not explain it above, we do not annotate it below.
Engraving, not ornament
A burin enforces discipline. One line, one density, one contrast. Nothing is rescued by a gradient. Nothing is saved by a shadow.
That is exactly the point. An engraving does not forgive approximation: either the hand is sure, or you see it. We choose motifs whose quality shows in the fineness of the line, not in the size of the print. A skull in profile, bone lace, an hourglass. Centred, symmetrical, with air around it.
Our two directions never change that logic. The Memento Mori signature stays monochrome, ink on paper, with a single oxblood accent. The Flash Tattoo collections borrow the heavy outline and four colours at most, never one more. The vocabulary changes. The rigour does not.
Twelve designs, then we look
We open with twelve designs. Not fifty, not three hundred. The number is a choice, not a constraint: it forces us to refuse.
A design we keep is a design we would wear ourselves. A design we turn down does not come back in another colour to fill a gap in the catalogue. Beyond this first run, no restock is guaranteed. A sold-out piece may stay sold out. That is the cost of a short run, and the reason it is worth anything.
No countdown. No manufactured urgency. If a motif speaks to you, take it. If it does not, it will not speak to you more clearly in three days.
Material before image
A fine engraving on poor fabric is worth nothing. We start from 220 gsm combed cotton, dense enough to hold the print and to age without sagging. Black, off-white. Unisex cut, S to XXL.
Everything else is measurement: actual print size, safe margin inside the print area, behaviour after washing. We publish what we have measured. What is not measured is not announced.
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What we refuse
We refuse the skull as a Halloween prop. We refuse glowing eyes, 3D effects, skeletons drawn for a laugh. We refuse shouted capitals and piled-up exclamation marks.
We also refuse to promise more than we can hold: an unmeasured delivery time, an unverified fabric, a price that moves at checkout.
What is left is a plain, stubborn idea. An image that crossed three centuries, printed once, worn for years. That is the whole of what we sell.