Pencil drawing of a skull wearing a feathered headdress with beaded strings, shaded in black and grey on grey paper, suitable as a tattoo design reference.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feathered headdress drawing

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic drawing of a skull in profile wearing a layered headdress of feathers, with a beaded band and dangling beaded strings. The feathers and skull are built up with fine pencil shading, with strong darks, soft greys and pale highlights, and some faint blue-grey tones. The drawing sits on grey paper with several pencils laid across the top left corner, and the design fills most of the frame.

Realism Skull Headdress Feather Bead

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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

Ruth had been told the skull was a sheep's, then a dog's, by two porters before she got the cardboard box open in the store beneath the Wakefield library. It was neither. The jaw was too narrow and sat in profile, as if the small head had been turning to look at someone standing behind it. Someone had strung it with beads that had gone brittle, and laid over it a crown of grey feathers that had kept their shape better than anything else in the box.

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She spent the first week only cleaning. Dust came away in soft drifts that she caught on blotting paper, and under it the feathers showed a blue-black sheen, like rain on slate. She sorted the beads on a tray by colour, then by size, then gave up on sorting and counted them instead. Forty-one. She wrote the number on the lid in pencil, the way her father had labelled his jars of nails.

On the ninth day a man from the council rang to ask whether the box could go to the skip. Ruth said it could go when she had finished, which was not a lie, because she had not yet decided what finished meant. That evening she sat at the kitchen table with grey card and the pencils from her father's tin, and found her hand kept returning to the feather tips, where the light caught each edge and left it pale.

When the council man came round to collect the box, she showed him the drawing instead. He studied it for a long time, then asked where the original had gone. Ruth told him it was in the drawer with the beads, where the damp could not reach it, and where it could keep its shape.