Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull wearing an ornate feathered headdress across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feather headdress on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull wearing a feathered headdress with an ornate lace-like ornament at the brow, with a cluster of detailed feathers rising above it. The skull and feathers are shaded in black and grey, with fine stippled detail in the ornament and soft tonal shading on the bone. The tattoo runs across the upper arm and onto the shoulder, against a dark background, with a patterned top worn off the shoulder.

Realism Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Skull Feather Headdress Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had fallen on the Tuesday market for nine days, and the lace stall under the church wall had sold nothing but umbrellas. Old Ysolde Marr kept her bones under a damp cloth on the bottom shelf, beside a bundle of grey gull feathers she bought from the poulterers. When a young man came in from the wet with a question about his mother's funeral, she lifted the cloth and showed him a skull already crowned with feathers.

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He asked the price. She said she wanted a true thing told at her stall before the rain stopped, and he laughed, because nobody in that town had ever wanted anything but coin. But he told her about his father, who had gone out past the breakwater and never come back to the shore. Ysolde listened with water running off her hood. She threaded a needle with black silk and began stitching lace across the brow, little hands and moons, one stitch for each word he spoke.

When she tied off the last knot, the cloud had broken and the cobbles were steaming. She set the skull in his palms. It weighed almost nothing, and the feathers lifted at their tips as if a breeze had found them. Go down to the harbour, she said, and lay it on the water where the tide turns. He did. The gulls came down around him in a grey cloud, and the lace on the brow shone like wet slate.

Next Tuesday the sun was out and the stalls were busy. Ysolde sat with her threads and her cloth, and the bottom shelf held only a coil of silk. Out past the breakwater, a gull with a black lace collar circled the boats, and nobody in the town could say where it had come from.