Black dotwork skull design on cream paper, framed by triangles and star motifs, drawn as a tattoo flash sheet with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric skull with dotwork shading

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A skull is drawn front-on and filled with dense stippled dotwork shading that builds the bone form. Overlapping equilateral triangles and six-pointed star shapes sit across the skull and around the edges, with ornamental filigree patterns across the eye sockets and jaw. The design is inked in black on aged cream paper and fills the frame evenly.

Dotwork Geometric Skull Triangle Star Filigree Ornament Geometric shape

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, you, and keep your hands out of the mint. No, I'm not starting at the beginning, because the beginning is the wall and you've heard about the wall a hundred times. Start with the gate, then. Start with Tobias Greave pushing it open with his shoulder, because his arms were full of string and pegs.

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He was the surveyor the old Lord hired the year the orchard died, and he had a notion that a garden ought to be laid out the way God laid out a star, three lines crossing three lines until nothing was left over. So he pegged out triangles on the lawn. Every bed was a triangle, and every triangle had another triangle folded inside it, and at the heart of each one he set a little stone star cut from the quarry at Harrow Fell. The gardeners said it gave them headaches. They said the roses wouldn't go where they were put.

The roses went where they liked, of course. Roses always do. But the skull was the trouble. Greave carved it himself from a grey block off the scree, then spent a whole winter filling it with dots, one small black point wherever the bone turned away from the light, thousands of them, until the face looked back at you out of the dark of the yew. He said dots were the only honest way to show a thing that was hollow. Then he laid a filigree of leaves across the eye sockets so the dead would have something to look at besides the rain.

And when they found him in March, sitting in the middle of the largest triangle with the string still wound round his fingers, the skull was looking straight up at the sky. You can see it still, if you go in by the gate and turn your face to the left. Nobody has moved it, and the dots have gone a little greener every year, the way anything does when the rain keeps getting in.