Black and grey traditional tattoo of a female face with a bindi and extended tongue, a mandala ornament and skulls, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Female face with skulls on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised female face with a bindi on the forehead and tongue extended is framed by a mandala-like ornament above and a row of skulls along the lower edge. Bold outlines and dense black shading are softened with grey tonal blending across the face and ornament. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a forearm, against a patterned fabric and a dark leather surface.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper's wife had nailed the carving above the wheelhouse door the winter before my first trip, and nobody on the Saint Brannock would say whose hands had cut her. She was a woman's face, blackened with lamp soot and tar, with a bead of red paint on her brow that the cook refreshed every Monday with his thumb. Old Tully swore she had come off a Grimsby wreck. The lads swore she stuck her tongue out at the weather, and that was why the weather mostly backed off.

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Below her, three small skulls ran along the rail, bolted on by the engineer, who said they were for the fish that never came back. Nobody believed him, but nobody argued either. I kept my gloves in my back pocket and my eyes on the hauling block, because that was what a deckhand did, and I had been a deckhand for eleven weeks when the sea came up grey off the Dogger Bank and the net fouled on something that was not fish.

The boat leaned until the scuppers ran green. The winch shrieked, the block jammed, and I was on my knees in the spray with a shackle in my fist and no idea which way was up. Tully's voice came back to me, flat and certain: when she's listing, don't look at the water, look at her. So I looked up at the carved face streaming with brine, the paint bleeding down her chin, and I found I was counting her breaths, in and out, the way you count a cough. On the third heave the shackle gave. The Saint Brannock came back upright like a dog shaking itself.

In the morning, with the harbour lights going pale over Scarborough, I climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse before anyone else was up. The paint on her brow had run into one eye. I pressed my thumb to the wood, to the little red bead, and held it there until it was warm.

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