Black and white dotwork and hatched drawing of a skull wearing a ribbed knitted beanie, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in a knitted beanie

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing human skull with its jaw slightly open, wearing a ribbed knitted beanie that covers the top of the cranium. The bone is built up with stippled dots and fine hatching, with heavier solid black in the eye sockets, nasal cavity and the beanie. The drawing is isolated on a plain white background with no body part or skin visible.

Dotwork Blackwork Skull Hat Teeth Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had been wearing the beanie since the October the heating in the teaching block gave up, and by February nobody on nights could say who had first pulled it down over his brow. Pat blamed a student. Joe blamed the porter who did the boilers. Priya, who had been on Ward Six longest, blamed nobody and kept a spare hat folded in her locker in case the first one went missing.

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Ioana started on nights in March and found the whole arrangement faintly ridiculous. At ten past three, with the corridor lights dimmed to amber and the obs trolley squeaking past the store, she went in for gloves and found the skull on the table by the sink, jaw hanging open as if it had been caught mid-sentence. The hat was ribbed charcoal, the stitches close and even, and tucked inside the rolled band was a paper tag in biro: for the cold ones. Priya's handwriting. Nothing more.

She asked about it at handover. Priya rinsed a mug and didn't turn round. 'My mother made the first one,' she said. 'Forty years of knitting for the hospital bazaar. She left me her needles and a box of wool. The moth got the old hat in the end, so I've been doing this one on my breaks.' She dried her hands on her trousers. 'Don't tell Joe. He thinks it's a student.'

At six, when the day staff came in smelling of car heaters and toast, Ioana went back to the store. The skull sat where it always sat, grinning at the door, the wool pulled snug over its ears. She didn't straighten it. She left the light on for whoever came next and walked home across the car park with her hands in her pockets, past the first real frost on the windscreens.