Black and grey tattoo design drawing of a skull wearing a feather headdress, with an eye motif on the forehead band and a stippled, engraved finish.

Skull in feather headdress flash design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and white drawing of a human skull wearing a large feather headdress with a banded brow piece. A mandala-style eye motif sits at the centre of the band, above a geometric triangle pattern. The feathers and skull are built from fine hatching, solid black fills and stippled dots, set against a radiating sunburst at the base.

Dotwork Blackwork Skull Eye Mandala Geometric pattern Sunburst Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 14th October. Wind backed north-west overnight and the lamp room smelled of paraffin and wet gull. Mr Pascoe left the skull on the top shelf when he went ashore for his chest, and I have not moved it, though I have dusted around it twice. Someone years ago bound a crown of grey gull feathers round its brow with copper wire, and set a little brass eye in the middle of the band, the sort the chandler in Shields sold for ship's clocks.

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The men say it watches the ships in. Cook says it is the Lord's own eye and the skull belonged to a sailor who drowned looking for the light. I say it is a skull and the wire is rusting into the bone. Still, when I climb to the gallery at three I find I look for it first, before the sea.

Last night the fog came in thick as wool and the lens threw its beam out at nothing. I went up with the spirit lamp and the trimming scissors and for an hour the glass was full of light that had nowhere to go. At dawn the sun came up through the cracked panes and laid its rays across the floor, a fan of them spreading from the base of the stand where the skull sits. I counted nineteen before the fog took them.

I have written to the Board's office in Hull asking for a new lens. I have not mentioned the skull. Tonight I will set it on the sill facing the water, so that whatever is out there can see the crown and know the light is kept.