Black filigree skull drawing on a white background, with scrolling leaves and lace-like linework across the cranium and jaw, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace-style skull design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing skull drawn in black ink, with its eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth outlined in fine detail. The cranium and jaw are filled with interlocking scrolls, leaf shapes and a lace-like mesh of hexagonal cells. The design is rendered in solid black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Skull Lace Leaves Scroll Filigree Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bobbins had been clicking since before light, and Mrs Oake would not let Ruth stop for the kettle. "Hexagons," she said, tapping the pattern pricked onto card. "Six sides, every one the same, or the net sags." Ruth had made hexagons for three winters. She could do them with her eyes shut, which was the trouble, because the pattern under the lamp had no eyes in it at all.

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The card had come up from the chapel store in a box of old church linen. It showed a skull worked in leaves and scrolls, with the jaw pricked in tight rows of pins and the sockets left open like windows. Nobody in Lydcombe could say who had drawn it. Mrs Oake's mother had made lace for the Fenwick funerals and said the skull was the one pattern she would never sell, because a face worked in thread stays where it is put. She would not say more. She only said the bobbins must be wound in the morning, and that the cloth was not for the living.

Ruth worked it through the autumn while the rain came sideways off the moor. The leaves bunched over the brow like hair. The cells of the net grew smaller toward the teeth until her fingers ached from the pins. When the last scroll was tied off, the cloth lay on the table like a held breath, and Mrs Oake took it to the window, held it up to the grey light and nodded once.

She folded it and laid it across the chair by the range, the one she had not left since her hip went. In the morning the chair was empty and the lace sat on the seat, squared at the corners, its two open eyes turned up to the ceiling. Ruth wound the bobbins one by one, hung them on their hooks and went down the lane to the chapel to ask the sexton for the store key. Somebody in Lydcombe would need a cloth for the Oake funeral, and she knew the pattern by heart now.