Pencil sketch of an animal skull with curved horns wearing a feather headdress, with a diamond shape on the cheek, drawn on paper.

Animal skull with feather headdress sketch

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an animal skull in profile, with curved horns rising behind a full headdress of layered feathers and a beaded band across the brow. The skull is shaded with soft graphite and dark hatching, with cracks and a diamond motif on the cheek. The feathers are drawn in dense strokes that fill the upper and left side of the page against a plain, warm-toned paper background.

Skull Animal skull Horn Feather Headdress Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August the windfalls under the Pennant trees were sour enough to make the wasps drunk, and Ada Kell had given up pretending she could keep them off the cart. She dragged the last crate to the gate and sat on it with her boots in the grass. Her uncle's ram had been dead since spring. Its skull still hung from a nail in the barn door, the horns bleached like candle wax, and every morning she walked past it on the way to the press.

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Ivo had dressed the skull the summer before the auction, when the orchard was going under and nobody in Hollin Cross was buying. Rook feathers, a jay's wing, a pheasant tail he'd won off a poacher at cards. He wove them into a crown that hid the cracks across the brow, and he painted a diamond on the cheekbone with ochre from the bridge. A thing that's been broken, he said, should at least look deliberate.

The buyer came on Thursday in a grey car that left ruts in the wet lane. He walked the rows, pressed his thumb into the bark, and said the trees were tired. Ada said nothing. When he reached the barn he stood under the skull a long time, and she watched him work out the price of the horns and then the price of the feathers, which he could not work out at all.

That evening she unhooked it and carried it up to the top row, where the Bramleys had never fruited well, and wedged it between two trunks facing the sunset. The feathers lifted in the wind coming off the valley. Next spring the grass would grow up through the ribs, and whatever the trees gave her would be hers to sell or keep.