Black line drawing flash design of a bird-beaked plague doctor mask wearing a top hat, framed by leaves and a large flower in a traditional style.

Plague doctor bird with flowers flash

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bird-beaked plague doctor mask in profile, wearing a top hat with a tied strap at the neck. A round eyepiece, dashed stitching along the beak and a bold outline define the mask, with a large five-petal flower and feathery leaves with small dots spreading out behind it. It is a black ink line drawing on tracing paper with no shading or colour, and other sketches are partly visible at the bottom edge.

Traditional Bird Mask Top hat Flower Leaves Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy's rosebeds had gone to aphids by the second week of July, and Tilly Crane had been sent to fetch the bone meal from the shed when the doctor came up the lane. She knew him by the hat before she saw anything else. Nobody in Sallow Cross wore a top hat to the churchyard gate, and nobody came up the lane unless somebody was already dead.

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He stopped at the wall and did not come through. The beak was a long curl of waxed leather, and through the round glass eye she could see only her own reflection, small and frowning. "Your mistress sent for leaves," he said, his voice muffled by the stuffed cloth. "Sage, rue, angelica, whatever grows in the shade."

She cut them with the kitchen shears, the way Mrs Abernethy had shown her, and laid them in a basket on the wall top. He tucked a cluster of feathers into the band of his hat, grey and brown and one bright blue. When she asked where he had got the blue one, he said it had come off a jay that flew into his window the spring before, and he had not had the heart to throw it out.

When she looked up again he had gone, but the basket was full of flowers she had not cut, pale dog roses and a single yellow bloom with a dark centre, laid across the sage like a gift. Tilly carried it back to the house and set it on the sill. The aphids were gone from the beds by morning, though nobody could say how, and the roses kept opening all that month, more than they ever had.