Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a skull wearing a feathered headdress, covering most of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered skull headdress across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull wearing a fan of feathers as a headdress fills the centre of the back. The feathers and skull are built from fine hatched and stippled black linework with grey shading that gives the skull depth. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's head cropped out and a tiled wall behind.

Blackwork Back Skull Feather Headdress Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, it has rained every day since you left, and the gutter over pitch nine has finally given up, so my stall smells of wet cardboard and the cheap cologne the man two pitches down wears to cover his bad knees. I sold the tin of buttons on Tuesday and the box of glass eyes went to a woman who said she was building a doll for her granddaughter and wouldn't say more. Don't tell Mum I'm doing the books in the van.

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The thing you'd want to hear about is the fan. Friday, half five, when the lamps were coming on and the tarpaulins were pooling, a lad in a yellow cagoule put a carrier bag on my trestle. Inside were forty-odd grey pigeon feathers, dried and clean, and a skull the size of a clenched fist that he said his nan kept on her windowsill. He wanted to know if I could make something from them. I said I sell things, I don't make them. He said go on, you've got the hands for it, and he was gone before I could argue.

I spent Saturday night at the kitchen table with a pot of glue and a bradawl, fanning the feathers in rows the way the old tailor on Fenwick Lane used to lay out his pins. Each quill I scored with a fine nib of Indian ink, hatching the barbs until they went from silver to smoke. By Sunday the skull sat in the middle like a small sun, and the fan spread round it, every feather catching the lamplight whichever way I tilted it.

He came back Monday. Didn't say a word, just took it, turned it over once, and paid me in coins still warm from his pocket. Then he unwrapped it from the carrier bag on the trestle to look at the skull again, and I watched him try to work out which way was up.