Black and grey dotwork skull tattoo with curled horns and a stippled crescent moon, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned skull with crescent moon on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull with curled horns and a cracked, angular jaw fills most of the frame, with its eye sockets and teeth picked out in heavy black. Fine stippled dots shade the skull's edges and the background, which fades into a pale circle that reads as a moon. The tattoo is in black and grey only and is shown from a close angle on the outer thigh, with a dark garment at the top edge of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Thigh Skull Horn Moon Crescent Teeth Stippling

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that lamp down and stop fidgeting, because I will only tell this once before the moon clears the Cutting and we all have to pretend we are not frightened of it. You want to know why the horned skull sits on the Caldwell hills with its jaw hung open. Well. Back when the grain towers at Hollin still had their lights, there was a woman called Ysolde Marr who kept goats on the salt flats, and every night she watched a pale coin rise and thought it belonged to nobody.

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The skull came up out of the dust one winter, horns first, like a ram breaking a frozen pond. It had teeth like a rake and a voice like a gate in the wind. It said it would take the moon off the sky if she gave it something she loved more. She gave it the goats, one by one, and waited for the moon to fall. It did not fall. Instead it began to thin, its pale edges shaving away each night until only a sliver of white hung over the flats, the rest sunk into the stipple of the dark.

Ysolde climbed the Cutting with a sack of salt and found the skull sitting in the dry riverbed, grinning through its cracked jaw. It asked what she had left to give. She said the goats were all she had ever owned, and the only thing still hers was her looking. The skull laughed like a gate. Then take the looking, it said, and she did, every night, until the moon went thin as a fingernail and the stars crept out to fill the empty sky.

That is the end of it, mostly. The goats came back in spring, though nobody could say where they had been. Ysolde never looked up at the sky again, and the moon has been sliding back out of the dark ever since, one grey night at a time. So if you see that pale edge rising over the flats, do not stare at it for long. Now go to bed before it notices you looking.