Black and grey neo-trad style flash of a woman with a towering updo, skulls, pearls and a lace collar.

Skull-adorned woman with pearls and lace

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a woman's head and shoulders, with a tall, feathered updo decorated with a skull and flowers. Strings of pearls, a jewelled pendant and skulls hang across her neck and chest, and a ruffled lace collar with a skull at its centre frames the design. The fine stippling and bold outlines are set against a solid black background.

Neo-trad Woman Skull Pearl Lace Flower Jewel Updo Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hester Vane had counted the pearls twice before St Oswin's struck eleven, and still the third string came up one short. She held the lamp closer to the bench. The collar lay across the linen like frost on a gate, its ruffled edge heavy with bobbin lace, a small bone-white skull worked into the centre where the threads knotted tight. Nobody in Saltmarrow ordered lace after dark, but the carriage had come down Gull Lane at nine with its blinds drawn, and the footman had paid in gold he would not let her weigh.

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The commission was simple and strange. Stitch the collar so the drowned could sit upon it. Thread one pearl for every sailor the harbour had swallowed that winter, and hang a skull where the bell-ringer's son had gone through the ice. Hester had refused the first request and accepted the second, because the second came with a silver purse heavy enough to pay off the shop on Tanner Row. She had stitched through three nights without sleep, and the skulls had grown stranger under her hands, each one smaller and cleaner than the last.

Past midnight the lamp guttered and the window latch lifted by itself. A woman stood on the sill, her headdress taller than the frame, her eyes half-lidded as if bored of waiting. She did not ask for the collar. "Give me the pearl you have been keeping for yourself," she said. Hester opened her apron pocket and found the one pearl she had saved from her mother's necklace, the one meant for her own burial. She laid it on the sill. The woman took it, and the lamp went out.

In the morning the collar was finished, every pearl in place and the last skull grinning at the centre. When the footman came back for it the bench was bare except for a single cold drop of lace on the floorboards. Hester still keeps her lamp unlit on Gull Lane. The collar has grown a little heavier each year, and she has stopped asking whose name she is stitching next.