Black and grey realism style flash design of a skull wearing a feather headdress, with a rope, banner and arrow below, not shown on skin.

Skull in feather headdress with banner

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human skull wearing a tall feather headdress with a patterned band across the forehead. A rope loops beneath the skull, with a ribbon banner reading STRANGER and WELCOME and an arrowhead hanging at the base. The work uses fine pencil-like hatching and soft shading on a plain light background, in black and grey only.

Realism Skull Feather Headdress Banner Rope Arrow Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the sign half-painted when the ferry bell goes, so you leave the brush standing in the tin of green and walk down the hill with your sleeves still rolled. Mrs Tennant is already on the bench at the quay, and her nephew is hauling a trunk off the gangplank as though it might bite him. Carrow has eleven houses and one inn, and nobody on it has needed a sign in forty years, because everyone already knows who belongs.

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The stranger is a woman in a grey mackintosh, with a rope coil over one shoulder and a wooden arrow shaft wrapped in twine. She asks for a bed. You tell her the Gull's Rest has three rooms and two of them leak. She laughs at that, properly, and says she has slept under worse skies than your ceiling. Mrs Tennant mutters that nobody on Carrow has ever spoken so boldly to her, and you decide she is going to be a long-term problem for the woman.

That evening you finish the sign. You paint the words on the old board in two colours, the first pale on the left and the second dark on the right, so the reading runs one way when you come in and the other way when you leave. The woman stands in the lane and reads it, then nods as if you have finally got something right. In the morning her rope is still on the peg by the door, and beside it lies the arrowhead she had been carrying, polished bright on the step, with a note tucked under it: for the board, so the next one knows which way to point.