Black and white ink drawing of a skull wearing a top hat with a scrolled ornament on the band, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in a top hat design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human skull wearing a tall top hat with a scrolled ornament on the hatband. The skull's eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth are rendered with dense cross-hatching and fine stippled lines. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with the subject centred and filling most of the frame.

Skull Top hat Ornament Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the hatbox, my girl, don't rattle it, and sit where the lamp can't blind you. That was the winter the tide gave us a gentleman. The boy went down the rocks at low water with a lantern and a gaff, because something on the shingle looked like a man waiting for a tram. It was a skull in a top hat, black silk gone green at the crown, with a tin scroll pressed into the band like a conjuror's flourish. The boy said the teeth were still in and grinning, as if the joke was on the rest of us.

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We carried him up the spiral, the boy swearing at every step, and set him on the chart table. Your grandfather wouldn't have him in the lamp room at first. Superstitious, he was, about anything that had been to sea and come back without its owner. But the hat stayed dry in a way nothing else on that rock ever did, and after a while it was simply part of the place. We hung it on the hook by the barometer, and the brass rail lost its shine the way it always did in fog.

Now here's the part your mother never believes. In the thick nights, when the beam swept round and the foghorn groaned, the hat would tip. Only ever a fraction, the brim dipping towards the glass as though it were watching the light go round. Your grandfather swore he heard two taps on the wood, like a man acknowledging a full house. He stopped complaining after that and started saying good evening to it.

The Whitlow went down with all hands the year after, two miles west of here, in weather no lamp could have fixed. Nobody came asking for the hat. So it stays on its hook, and when you feel the floor shudder with the turn of the light, don't look up at it. Just trim the wick, lift your cup, and let him have the last bow.