Pen and ink sketch of a human skull drawn with dense cross-hatching on cream paper, beside a black mechanical pencil.

Cross-hatched ink skull sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A front three-quarter view of a human skull is drawn in dark ink on cream paper, with the eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth shaded most heavily. The linework is loose and sketchy, with dense crosshatching around the outline and faint construction lines across the page. The palette is black ink on cream, and a black pen rests diagonally across the left side of the sheet.

Skull Sketch Ink Pen Paper

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was late again, so the log at Scarrow Head got a skull in its margins for the third week running. I drew with the pen my father left me, a heavy thing with a knurled grip that wanted to be used on something harder than paper. Mostly I drew to keep my hands steady when the fog came in off the Sound and the foghorn started its low complaint.

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The skull belonged to the bosun of the Ellen Marr, whose timbers the sea gave back in pieces to the shingle below the light. I had kept it in a biscuit tin on the landing for eleven months. Each night I shaded a little more: the eye sockets first, then the nasal gap, then the row of teeth, until the page looked the way the fog did, dense at the edges and hollow in the middle.

On the night the relief boat finally came, the fog thinned enough to show the mainland lights. Mr Pryce from the lighthouse board climbed the stairs with a clipboard and asked whether the log was up to date. I turned the book towards him. He looked at the skull for a long time, then at the faint construction lines I had ruled across the page, and said the drawing was wrong, that the bosun had a bad jaw on the left.

I told him that was the point. I had not been drawing the man. I had been drawing where the sea had let go of him, and the lines that would hold the picture together long after the lamp was dimmed. He signed the log under my sketch without another word, and in the morning I went down to the shingle to see what the tide had left me.