Black and grey dotwork drawing of a white-haired figure with a halo, eyes in the palms, beaded necklaces and two skulls at the base, on a grey background.

Hooded figure with skulls and dotwork shading

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A standing female figure with long white hair and a black disc behind her head, set within a thin circle. She holds her hands up with eyes drawn into the palms, wears strings of beads, and sits over two human skulls. Her dark starry robe and the figure's skin are built from fine stippled dotwork and crosshatching, with bold solid black areas for contrast.

Dotwork Blackwork Woman Skull Halo Eye Bead Star Robe Hand Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, the thirteenth. The black disc sat over the church tower again at dusk, the way it has since the Harrow boys dug through the chandler's cellar and brought up eight skulls wrapped in wet sailcloth. I have counted them twice. Eight pale bowls lying in the shingle below the slipway, and beside them the woman who walks the tideline at the turn of the water, hands lifted, an open eye set in each palm like a coin pressed into clay.

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She does not speak to the boys. She speaks to me, though I keep the tide-bell and have no reason to be spoken to. Last night she held out a string of beads, each one no bigger than a pea and cold as a churchyard step, and let them run through her fingers one by one. My father kept a tally of drownings on the wall of the bell-house in chalk. I found his marks this morning, and beneath them, in a hand I did not recognise, a column of names I had not yet been told.

I carried the skulls back up to the chandler's cellar myself, in a handcart, while the bell was still. When I set the last one down, the starry black of her robe seemed to spill from the shingle and drip off the edge of the slipway, slow as treacle, and the eyes in her palms turned towards the bell-house. I rang it once. She stopped walking. Then she closed both hands, very gently, the way you would shut a book you mean to open again.

I have chalked my own name on the wall beneath my father's. Tomorrow I will check the tide-table twice, as he always did.