Black dotwork tattoo of a skeleton holding a staff on a house boat over rolling waves, with five stars above, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton with staff on a house boat

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeleton holding a long staff stands on the roof of a small boat-shaped house floating on stylised waves, with five star shapes set above. The design is built from stippled dotwork shading and bold outlines, with the waves drawn as curved bands of dots and solid lines. It is rendered entirely in black ink and greys on a light skin tone, with the subject centred on the arm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water reached the sills on the Tuesday, and by Thursday the chapel was a rock with a weathervane on it. Agnes Peel would not leave her cottage. She lashed the chimney to the rafters with bedsheets and told the constable she had an arrangement with the river.

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The arrangement was with Sexton Tobias Gall, who had been dead eleven years and did not mind the damp. He came up the stairs at dusk with his ash staff, bones clicking, and climbed onto the ridge without a word. "Where to?" Agnes asked. He tapped the staff against the slates and pointed at the five stars coming out over Hollin Fell, the ones her father used to steer the sheep home by.

All night the house lifted off its footings and turned slowly on the black water. Gall kept the star-line in the staff's shadow. Agnes made tea on the stove, which stayed hot though nothing fed it, and talked to him about bread prices, the vicar's lame dog, and her son in Leeds who never wrote. Gall nodded in the right places. Once a bell rang somewhere under them, very faint, and he raised his skull to listen until it stopped.

At first light the flood drew back as quickly as it had come, and the house settled onto the top of the wall at Hollin Dyke, a little askew. Gall climbed down, leaned the staff against the chimney, and was gone. Agnes found it there in the morning, dry, with a strand of weed caught in the knot. She stood it by the door. The letter from Leeds came in April, and it said only that the water was fine there, and she should come when she was ready.

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