Flash drawing of a pirate skull wearing a red bandana, with a sparrow perched on top, shown in sketchy linework and muted colour.

Pirate skull with red bandana and sparrow

Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of a skull in a pirate style, wearing a red bandana with long red and black hair, beads and a moustache and beard. A small sparrow perches on the top of the bandana. Hatched linework and muted green, red, cream and black tones sit on a plain grey background.

Skull Pirate Bandana Bird Bead Hair Moustache Beard

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You unlock the back door at quarter past four with flour already on the cuff of yesterday's jumper. The ovens tick as they warm. On the shelf above the proving drawers sits the tin skull the last owner left behind, grinning under a red rag knotted over its crown, and every morning since you arrived you have set a crust on its head, though you could not say why.

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The sparrow comes at ten to five, through the gap beside the extractor vent, with the swagger of a man who owns the ship. It lands on the rag, cocks its head at the dough you are scoring, and makes its opinion of your slashes known in a series of short, rude chirps. You tell it the bread is not for it. It eats the crust anyway.

In February the crust stays where you put it. The sparrow does not come. You check the flour sacks, the bins, the rafters, the gap by the vent, and at half four you find a feather on the scales and nothing else. You take the day shift off the baps and work the dough harder than you need to, the way people do when they are angry at small things.

On the third morning it returns, one wing held a little away from its body. You fashion a sling from muslin in an empty proving drawer and set the bird inside. It bites your thumb to the bone. When the sun comes up over the harbour you open the back door, tear the heel off the first loaf, and set it on the rag. The sparrow takes it, and is gone before the kettle boils.