Black and white flash design of a skull wearing a feathered headdress above two crossed axes, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feather headdress with crossed axes

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A skull wearing a tall, layered feathered headdress sits centrally, with its jaw and eye sockets drawn in solid black. Two axes cross beneath the skull, and decorative bands and geometric patterning fill the lower section. The design uses black linework and dense hatching in black and white, with no colour.

Blackwork Skull Headdress Feather Axe

Find an artist for this

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

Dunmere's grinder had never once been paid in coin he could spend. Tobias Crane sat at his wheel every evening by the sluice, turning the stone with his foot while the water ran under the planks, and the village brought him what it could: a hoe with a split handle, a billhook gone soft at the edge, once a child's wooden sword that he sharpened without a word and returned with a rook's feather tucked into the hilt. Payment, he said, was whatever the iron had cost someone to keep.

Keep reading

The winter the mill-race froze, a woman called Hester Lowe came up the bank with two felling axes wrapped in sacking. Her husband had gone into the fen for reeds and not come back, and she wanted the blades ground so they would bite, so she could cut the willows for the fire herself. Crane unwrapped them, turned them over, and set them side by side on the bench. He did not ask what the wrapping was for. He ground them through the night, and at first light he laid the blades crossed on the sill, the way the old wardens had laid iron over a churchyard gate.

Hester stood a long while looking at them. Then she said the fen had taken her man with his boots still on, and that she would rather have sharp axes than a stone the parish had never paid for. Crane nodded, took a feather from the pocket of his coat, and wove it through the sacking with three more that had been gathering on his sill since autumn.

She carried the axes home at dawn. By the thaw the willows were down and the grate was lit, and nobody in Dunmere ever again asked Crane what he was owed.