Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a skull merged with layered feathers, placed on the side of the ribs.

Feathered skull on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull is combined with layered feather or wing forms that curve around it, with a striped crest and small scale-like patterns at the edges. The shading is built from fine stippled dots and solid black areas, giving the bone a soft, textured look against sharper, darker linework in the plumage. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and fills the side of the torso from the ribs towards the hip.

Dotwork Blackwork Ribs Skull Feather Wing Ornamental Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told not to touch the thing above the stairs. Mrs Pellow hangs it from a hook on the landing every October, a skull the size of a cabbage with a crest of striped quills gone the colour of weak tea, and she dusts it with a feather duster while the lodgers are at breakfast. Gull Rock House has eleven rooms and one rule about the landing, and you are the new girl who has been there nine days without asking why.

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The lodgers say it came off a ship that broke up on the Scarrow sands in the winter of the big gale, and that the bird it belonged to was a fishing owl nobody had seen on this coast since. Your room sits directly beneath it. On the ninth night a scratching starts, patient as a nail drawn across slate, and when you climb the stairs with your candle the landing is empty except for the hook, swinging very slightly, though no door is open to the sea.

You find the feathers first, fresh and wet with salt, lying in a line towards Mrs Pellow's room. Her wardrobe door stands ajar, and inside is a second skull, smaller, its crest matching the first feather for feather. Mrs Pellow is not asleep. She sits up in bed with her hands folded on the quilt and says, quite kindly, that the bird has been looking for its other half since the wreck, and that you have the look of someone who could carry a message down to the harbour.

You take the small skull in both hands. It weighs no more than a teacup. Down on the shingle the tide is turning, and the first gull of the morning goes over the roof with a sound like tearing paper. You carry it down the back stairs in your apron pocket, its crest brushing your palm with every step, and you do not look back at the landing, because you already know the hook will be empty when the lodgers come down to breakfast.