To skull or not to skull?

...that is the question.

This is a t-shirt design I came up with a little while ago for a local MMA event and I've been thinking about a symmetrical skull design over some flourishy rusty blade type stuff in this style as a concept design. Evidently it would be very agro and offend every anti-skull person's sensibilities, the only thing is, I honestly think I could work it and turn it into a skull deck to end all skull decks. Y'know? Taking this route however would clearly be opting for a very specific style and capitalising on a current trend, but I do believe plenty of people would want a truly dark and aggressive well executed skull deck, and I could be the man to give it to them.

Would I be satisfied as an artist with this outcome though? I personally love the whole skull thing, if it's done right, but would I be happy that I had kept in keeping with tradition or would I be completely selling out to a trend? That said, would selling out to a trend prove ultimately more successful?

I'm gonna design a skull deck, as one concept, whilst also designing at least one completely non-skull deck in a more traditional style as well, to keep both sides of myself (and everyone else) happy.

I had a brief play with one idea I had of using crosses as a secondary decoration, the blank spaces would be filled with flourishy stuff of course but this was a very rough and quick design that I didn't put a whole lot of effort into. I have some scribbles with much better skull layouts on them that would require some more hand-drawn stuff which I haven't yet got around to doing, one in particular with some nice eagle/angel wings on it which I think would look sweet (gotta love the wings on the back of a deck of cards).

The skull deck is definitely getting designed, and so is at least one other non-skull deck. I have a feeling I might be designing a few before settling on one to print...