Black and grey dotwork skull tattoo with an eye in a triangle and heart-shaped rays, on the thigh.

Skull and eye tattoo on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull sits at the centre of the design, framed by a ring of heart-shaped rays, a scrolled ornamental border and a small symbol above the eyes. Below it, an eye inside a triangle is surrounded by scrollwork and a geometric key-pattern band. The work combines bold black outlines with stippled dotwork shading in black and grey, and the design fills the thigh from top to bottom.

Dotwork Geometric Blackwork Thigh Skull Eye Heart Triangle Mandala Ornament Scrollwork Geometric pattern Sun rays

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the fire is low and the night is long, so you will have to lean in. In the kingdom of Vael, beyond the salt flats where the river forgets its own name, the old queen Ysolde kept a clockmaker in her tower. He was a thin man with a cracked monocle and dust in every crease of his coat, and he was the only one in the realm permitted to look directly at the sun. The queen wanted to know what lay behind her own eyes, so she sent for him.

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He worked for nine winters. He opened her skull with a silver key, a single turn at a time, and set inside it a small brass eye that could see through walls and into the hearts of men. Each morning the hearts of her courtiers came out of the sun's rays like dropped coins, and each evening they rolled back into the dark. The queen grew fond of the eye. She grew fond of the clockmaker too, and that was her mistake, because a queen who loves a man will one day ask him what he is thinking.

He told her the truth. The eye saw everything except its own maker, and the key had been turned once too often. On the tenth winter the queen climbed to the tower herself and found the clockmaker gone, only his monocle left on the sill, and beneath it a note in his neat hand that read: look inside, you will find me. She did not look. To this day the eye sits in the centre of the kingdom's great square, unblinking, and the children of Vael walk past it with their hands in their pockets and their hearts very carefully closed.