Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a skull wearing a feathered headdress, covering the upper back.

Skull in feather headdress across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull wearing a fan of detailed feathers and a patterned band covers most of the upper back. The feathers and skull are built from fine hatched linework and stippled shading in black ink, with solid black areas in the eye sockets and feather tips. The image is in black and grey, framed by the bare back and a tiled wall behind.

Blackwork Back Skull Feather Headdress Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

We found the skull in the weed behind Hollin Lock the week the water ran brown and the towpath vanished under the hedge. Dad fished it out with the boathook and set it on the cabin roof to dry, where it grinned at the heron that came down every morning to watch us. Mum said it was a bad omen. Dad said it was a crock with a face on it, an old pot somebody had thrown in the cut, and they argued about that for three locks.

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Mum was the one who found the feathers. Grey and barred goose quills had caught in the rudder chain, and she worked them loose and bound them with waxed thread into a fan. She wedged it round the skull's brow the way a cook garnishes a pie, because, she said, a thing the river had kept for a season deserved a hat. I thought it was daft. By the next morning the quills had gone stiff and the skull looked almost pleased with itself, like a stationmaster on a Sunday.

A hire boat came up behind us at Hollin with a man in a yellow oilskin who knew a museum in Leeds and wanted to take it there. He offered a tin of Golden Syrup, then a bottle of rum, then his card. Dad turned him down flat and said the river had lent it to us, not sold it. The man shrugged and went on up the cut, and I watched his wake fold itself flat against the reeds.

That night I lifted the skull down, feathers and all, and held it up to the lamp. The quills lit up amber at the tips. Then I leaned over the side and let it slip into the black water, where it turned once, slowly, like it was looking back at the boat, and drifted out past the lock gate while the heron lifted off the bank and followed it.