Ink drawing of a skeleton with many arms raised around a halo and a full moon, with feathered wings behind the skull, in navy and cream.

Multi-armed skeleton with moon and halo

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical skeleton stands at the centre, with its skull framed by a striped halo and a full moon behind it. Multiple arms radiate outward, each ending in a delicate hand, and feathered wing shapes curve behind the head. The fine stippled shading on the moon and bones contrasts with the solid navy background and cream linework.

Skeleton Skull Moon Halo Wing Arm Hand Ribcage Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon has been full for three nights, and the cutting-house on the river road is too quiet for the work waiting in it. You carry the lamp in yourself while your master snores beside the jars of cedar oil. The old scribe from the lower tomb was brought in at dusk and laid on the slab, wrapped to the chin, and you were told to finish him by morning. You have bound the linen tight, as you were taught, and counted his fingers twice.

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When you turn back from the basin, the wrapping is off and the slab is empty. He stands against the wall, all bone, the lamplight sliding over his ribs like water. He has more arms than a scribe should own, six or eight of them, fanning from the shoulders like the spokes of a cart wheel, each hand small and delicately made, as if built to hold a reed pen with great patience. Behind his skull a pitted grey moon hangs loose from the painted plaster, and the feathers at his shoulders lift as though a wind has come through the cellar.

"You have bound me wrongly," he says, and his jaw moves like a latch. "Every hand must carry something to the boat. Find me the eight things I left unwritten." You search the shelves. There is a cup of salt, a broken stylus, a barley cake gone hard, a single yellow thread. You press each into a palm, and each palm closes with a dry little click.

When the last hand closes, the scribe bows to the moon and walks out through the door as though it were a river. You are left with the empty slab and one bare palm still open against the wall. You fold it around the lamp handle. By morning the oil is cold, but the handle is warm.