Neo-traditional tattoo design drawn on paper showing a woman wearing an ornate crown, holding a skull, in grey shading with red accents.

Neo-trad woman with crown and skull design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil and ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a woman with wavy hair, a decorative crown and a heavy-lidded, pale face, holding up a human skull. The linework is bold and the shading is grey and black, with ornate lace-like patterns on her collar and sleeve. Red-orange accents outline and fill sections of the composition, which is set on a sheet of paper with pens at the edges.

Neo-trad Woman Crown Skull Hair Earring Lace pattern Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The queen had the skull carried up from the river barges on the third day of the flood, wrapped in red linen that the dyers of the lower quarter would have called a waste of good madder. She did not weep over it. She lifted it by the crown of its brow and turned it toward the window, so the sun passed through the empty eyes and laid two bright coins on the tiles, and then she told me to sharpen my reed and write down what it had told her in the night.

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I had served her eleven years and knew better than to ask. The skull had belonged to Teos, the grain-factor who sold the granaries to the northern garrisons while the city went hungry. Everyone in Memphis knew the story of his drowning, and everyone agreed it had been an accident. The lace at her collar was woven by Mirri, the widow who had stitched the mourning veils for the king's household, and who had gone quiet three weeks before the flood, when the palace guards began carrying her bread to the gate instead of to her door.

When I had written the first line, she leaned over my shoulder and tapped the page with one long finger. 'Not that,' she said. 'Write that he spoke, and that I listened, and that I was merciful.' I dipped the reed in the red ink we kept for feast-days and wrote it the way she asked. Then, because the skull was still gazing at the window and nobody had asked it for anything, I added one more line in black, a true one, and tucked it beneath the seal where she would not find it until the river had gone down.