Black and grey Japanese style tattoo flash of a horned oni skull wearing a hannya mask, surrounded by swirling smoke, with no body placement shown.

Oni skull with hannya mask design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a horned skull with a fanged hannya style mask held across the lower face, set among swirling smoke or cloud shapes. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black areas and grey shading that gives the skull and mask volume. The composition is a tall, centred design on a plain white background, suited to a large piece.

Japanese Skull Horn Smoke Swirl Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

So you'll want to know why we don't whistle down the Number Four shaft, and I'll tell it, though my mother told it better, and she was married to a man who went down that shaft every morning for thirty-one years. Nobody in Ashgill had a bad word for the fire-damp lamps until the summer of the long strike, when the owners sent men in to clear the old galleries, and one of them, a lad called Edwin Mair, came up with a thing in his pocket that wasn't his.

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It was a mask, carved from grey bone or wood gone to bone, with a face like a woman who has been crying through her teeth. It had two horns and a mouth full of fangs, and when Edwin held it up to the lamp, the smoke off the old powder seemed to lean toward it, the way a dog leans toward its master. Nobody wanted it in the house. His wife set it on the mantel, and it was gone by morning. The next night the whole of Ashgill smelled of wet ash and sulphur, and the clock on the chapel wall ran backwards for an hour.

Edwin went back down to find it, though he swore after that he never did. What came up was his lamp, still lit, and a skull hanging on a cord of black smoke, grinning as if it had waited a long time for someone to bring it its face back. My grandfather said the oni only wanted its due: the men who had dug those galleries without a prayer, and the boys who had died in them. So the village held a wake for the lot of them, every name read aloud at the pithead until the sun came up.

When the last name was said, the smoke lifted off the shaft in long grey curls and drifted out over the moor like a tide going out. The mask lay in the wet grass by the gate, face up, its mouth closed at last. We buried it under the chapel step. You can still see the stone, if you're not afraid of the dark.