Black and grey dotwork flash design of a horned animal skull above a pair of scales holding a feather and a small object, with an ankh inside a downward triangle.

Horned skull and scales dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stippled ink drawing of a horned animal skull with a draped headdress sits above a horizontal bar balanced on a pair of scales. The left pan holds a small object and the right pan holds a feather, and a large downward triangle filled with dense dots frames an ankh below. The work uses only black dots on a pale background, with shading built up through dot density.

Dotwork Skull Horn Scale Feather Ankh Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were nineteen the winter the checkweigher's ledger began to lie, and you were the only one at Carrick Hollow who could read Mr Pell's hand. Every dawn the tubs came up the headstocks and you stood at the beam with your pencil while the old scales swung and settled, and every dawn the figures came out a little lighter than the chalk marks the hewers had scratched on their tubs. Mr Pell swore the scales were honest. The ram's skull over the office window said nothing, which was its nature.

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The skull had come off a hill farm before the company took the land. Someone had nailed it above the weighbridge door so the men would touch the horns going past for luck, and the bone had worn pale where their hands landed. On the sill beneath it lay a grey feather a boy had found in the drift, and nobody had moved it in years. Pell kept a brass tare weight in a drawer and let you hold it only on Sundays, when the pit was quiet and the beam was checked.

One night in February you stayed late with the ledger and the lamp, and you found the stone. It was a squared block of gritstone the size of a loaf, dusted black, sitting in a tin pan under the counter where the left arm of the beam rested when no tub was on it. Every tenth tub, you realised, had been balanced against it and then written down as coal that was never there. You lifted the stone out. The beam tipped sharply to the right, and you watched the empty pan go up while the feather pan sank, though it held nothing but air.

In the morning you copied the true figures into the ledger in your own hand and left the stone on Pell's desk where he could not miss it. He came in whistling, read the page, looked at you, and said nothing at all. The men still touch the horns going past. You still touch them too, though you no longer think the ram is watching for anything but the weight.