Four black ink flash designs on a beige background: a skull with a bandana and feather, a feather headdress, a skull with a feather headdress, and a dreamcatcher with feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four skull and feather designs on beige

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four black line drawings: a skull wearing a bandana with a feather tucked beside it, a feather headdress, a skull wearing a feather headdress, and a dreamcatcher with a geometric web and hanging feathers. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatching and stippled shading in the feathers and bandana folds. The designs are arranged in a loose grid on a plain beige background, and no colour is used.

Blackwork Skull Feather Headdress Bandana Dreamcatcher

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up at first light full of nothing but weed and a single grey skate, and Ruth Almond swore at it in the quiet voice she kept for bad weather. Her son Callum was on the winch with his bandana knotted at the back of his head the way his late father had worn it, and he didn't look round. Behind the wheelhouse door hung the flash sheet that had come aboard in a tin of tobacco, four drawings in ink gone soft with salt: a skull under a bandana with a feather tucked beside it, a fan of quills, a skull with feathers spread behind it like a gull lifting, and a dreamcatcher whose web had been drawn with a ruler and a fine nib.

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Ruth had never been able to say why the dreamcatcher bothered her. The web looked like a net that had learned to hold water. She thought of the trawl she had lost off Fraserburgh the winter the Morag Rose went down, how the sea took the whole warp and left the floats bobbing in a line like pale heads. Her husband had sat at the galley table for three nights afterwards, mending by lamplight, tying each knot with his tongue between his teeth until the twine ran out and he had to start on the second spool.

Callum said the sheet was rubbish and wanted it burned. Ruth said nothing. She unpinned the dreamcatcher, folded it once along the middle of the web, and tucked it into the bib of her oilskin where it lay flat against her ribs.

They hauled again at nine. The net came up heavy and silver, the mesh bellied with herring, and for a moment the gulls went quiet over the rail. Ruth kept one hand flat on her chest and felt the paper hold.