Black ink flash sheet of five tiki mask designs in bold outline and hatched detail, drawn as tattoo-style designs without any skin shown.

Five tiki mask designs on a sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing sheet showing five tiki-style mask designs of varying sizes, arranged across the page. Each mask has heavy outlines, geometric facial features and stacked lip and brow shapes, with fine parallel hatching used for shading and texture. The page is cream and the drawings are monochrome, with no colour applied.

Traditional Mask Tribal Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carver had been dead eleven years when Marisol found his tools wrapped in a fishing net under the boathouse, the blades still greasy with the oil he never stopped using. She laid them out on the tarpaulin in order of size, the way he used to, and then she counted the masks stacked against the wall. Five of them, all with the same wide brow and the same mouth pulled down at the corners as though something bitter had been said and not yet forgiven.

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Her uncle Teo came down the slipway with two mugs of tea and stopped at the sight of them. He said the old man had carved them for the regatta that never happened, the year the harbour master fell out with the fishermen over the new jetty. Each mask was meant to be hung facing a different boat. Nobody had asked him to finish them, so he hadn't.

Marisol picked up the smallest, the one with the narrow eyes and the square tongue cut into the chin, and turned it toward the water. Out past the breakwater a single gull hung in the wind, not moving, watching the harbour the way the masks did. She thought about the jetty and the feud and how long people will keep a grudge carved into wood. Then she took the smallest mask down to the water's edge, held it up, and said the old man's name loudly enough for the boats to hear. Teo, behind her, set his mug down on the stones and didn't say a word.