Watercolour and ink drawing of a skull wearing a colourful feathered headdress, shown as a design with no body placement.

Feathered headdress skull in watercolour

Colour · Flash

A skull wears a headdress of fine-lined feathers in red, green, blue, purple and yellow, with a beaded band and a round medallion at the side. The skull is drawn in pen with cross-hatching and softer watercolour washes, and coloured paint runs down from the jaw. The pale cream background and loose splashes of colour frame the drawing.

Skull Feather Headdress Medallion

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom, the roof over the back room gave out on Tuesday, the night you left, so I've spent three days learning what happens to wet gouache. Don't laugh. The drawing was pinned to the easel with the good cartridge paper, and when the rain came through the lath it ran straight down the sheet. I went up with a tea towel and saved what I could, then stood there in my socks doing sums on Mr Okafor's commission. Forty pounds for a headdress of feathers and a grinning skull. Not enough to fix a roof.

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The feathers were the easy part. He wanted every colour the dye-shop in Deptford had, red going to green going to a blue that looked almost wet even when it was dry. I spent a week on the cross-hatching with a pen I'd nearly thrown out, and the medallion took two evenings alone. Then the water got in and the blue bled into the red along the jaw and made a purple I could never have mixed on purpose. I was going to start again. I didn't. I let the drips run down to the bottom edge and left them where they fell.

Okafor came on Friday and stood in front of it for a long time with his hands in his coat pockets. He didn't say anything about the roof. He said, "That's the part I wanted," and pointed at a line of paint that had pooled under the teeth and dried into a thin bright tail. Then he paid the forty and asked if I'd sign it.

I signed it underneath the splash, where the colour ran off the paper into the margin. Come home when you're done in Thurso, and bring a ladder.