Black and grey pen and wash drawing of a cracked skull with a gaping jaw and jagged teeth, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Cracked skull with jagged teeth

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human skull with a fractured, cracked cranium and a wide open jaw filled with long, pointed teeth. The linework is bold and dark, with stippled and hatched grey shading on the bone surfaces and deep black voids in the eye sockets and mouth. The skull is centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Skull Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shut your mouths and mind the lamp, because the tide turns at the second bell and I'll not tell this twice. Out past Gannet Skerry there is a black shoulder of rock the old men called the Hob's Head, and on the night of the great blow the Mary Tallow went onto it with nine men aboard. Her figurehead was a carved sea-hag, grey driftwood with a jaw hung on iron pins, and the captain's wife swore it had been watching the water for forty years before it ever saw a wreck.

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The sea gave back one thing in the spring. Ruan Dacey, who kept the shop at Strand Cove, found the hag face down in the wrack at dawn, split clean across the crown like a boiled egg. She lifted it by the jaw and the jaw snapped shut on her thumb, and she always said it bit her for stealing it. She carried it home anyway, wrapped it in a fishnet, and set it on the windowsill facing the water where the gulls wouldn't land. She hammered nails into its gums to hold the loose teeth, and every nail head caught the light.

That summer the boats came home light. Nets came up empty and the pots gave nothing but crabs. Her grandson Tom, nine years old and believing none of it, rowed out to the Hob's Head to prove it was only rock. He came back at dusk white as a gull, saying the water over the shoulder was stacked with skulls, hundreds of them, all turned toward the cove, and every one with its jaw hanging open.

Ruan went to the windowsill that night. The hag was facing the wrong way, toward the Skerry, and its jaw was shut tight. Nobody at Strand Cove has ever said who turned it round. So keep your thumbs out of the teeth, and if you hear the bell at the second turn, don't go looking for the boat.