Black ink dotwork drawing of a layered mandala flower above a bird skull, shown as a tattoo design on paper for a placement that is not visible.

Mandala flower over a bird skull design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on paper shows a layered geometric mandala flower with a bird skull beneath it, the skull's beak pointing downward. The mandala is built from fine line petals and diamond shapes, while the skull is rendered mainly with stippled dots that create shading along its bony edges. The design is in black ink only, centred on a plain sheet with two markers resting across the top.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Flower Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had held the lane for six days when Ada found the rook under the hedge by the lower gate. It had been picked clean by something patient, and the skull lay on its side in the rime like a small boat turned over. She carried it up to the farmhouse in a flour sack and set it on the kitchen table beside the tea caddy, where her father would have to look at it before he sat down.

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"Bird's no use to anyone," Walter said, not unkindly, and went out to see to the heifers. Ada did not argue. That night, with the range banked and the wireless off, she sat with her brother's drawing pens and a sheet of cartridge paper and tried to make the skull into something the frost could not take. She began with the petals because they were easier. Every layer she laid down opened another, a ring inside a ring, until the page held a mandala the size of a dinner plate. The skull she left till last, and stippled it with the finest nib, dot by dot, so the bone grew shadow along the beak and the empty sockets darkened like wet slate.

When she finished it was past three and the candle had burned to a stub. She pinned the drawing to the dresser and went to bed. In the morning Walter stood in front of it with his cap in his hands for a long while. "Where'd you learn that?" he asked. She said she had not learned it at all, that it had been under the hedge the whole time, waiting for someone to bother with it.

He took the drawing down, folded it in quarters and put it inside his coat. In March, when the rooks came back loud over the elms and the first ploughs turned the brown earth, he pinned it up again at the back of the barn, where the light from the door fell across it. Nobody on the farm ever asked him what it was.