Black ink flash drawing on pink paper showing a mountain range in a circle, an animal skull with an eye and rays, and a feather crossed with a sprig inside a dotted circle.

Mountains, skull and feather flash sheet

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Three separate tattoo designs are drawn in pen on pink paper, stacked vertically. The top design is a circle outlined with dashes containing a jagged mountain range shaded with hatching, and the middle shows a side-on animal skull with an eye between the jaws and small triangular rays. The bottom design is a dark feather crossed with a leafy sprig and small flower, enclosed in a dotted circle with a row of triangles.

Botanical Dotwork Mountain Skull Eye Feather Sprig Leaves Flower Circle Triangle Dotted circle Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the front step by the third day, so Maud went out through the kitchen and up the back of the woodpile with a shovel over one shoulder and the lantern swinging from her wrist. Behind her the inn kept its breath. Nine guests were sleeping off the pass road, and her father had gone quiet since the drover's mule came down the scree without its rider.

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The skull lived on the top shelf above the bar, where her grandfather had put it after the wolves came off the high ground in the hard winter of the forties. Its jaws hung open on a wire hinge, and someone long dead had painted a small watchful eye between the teeth, so the thing seemed to be still keeping count of who came through the door. Maud had never liked it. Tonight she took it down anyway, because the drover's boy had said the mule stopped at a cairn below the ridge, and her grandfather always claimed a cairn meant somebody had left word.

She found it tucked under the flattest stone: a grey feather bound to a sprig of rosemary with red thread, and a scrap of paper that said only, in pencil, Keep to the light. The wind had thinned the snow to a glitter, and the ridge stood out against the stars like the edge of a broken plate. Maud set the lantern on the stone and turned the skull so its open jaws caught the flame, and the painted eye seemed to blink in the glare.

From somewhere under the white came a whistle, two notes, the way the drover had taught his boy to call the dogs. Maud answered it with the same two notes, and then she started down the slope, slowly, with the light held high and the skull knocking softly against her hip.