Skull in feathered headdress in profile

Colour · Flash

A skull faces left in profile, wearing a tall headdress of layered feathers with beaded bands, a braided tail and hanging ribbons. A hoop with a web-like pattern sits beside the ear. The fine linework is shaded with blue and pink tones, and the design fills a tall, narrow composition on a plain cream background.

Skull Headdress Feather Bead Braid Ribbon Hoop Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways down Kirkgate since seven, and by eleven the only customers were the pigeons and a man selling phone chargers from a tarpaulin. I was packing the hat stall away when an old lad in a green cagoule set his carrier bag on my trestle and asked if I'd buy a skull.

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It was a real one, yellowed and polished, with a wire hoop threaded through the sockets and a crown of pheasant feathers lashed on with waxed thread. Three rows of bone-coloured beads ran across its brow. The feathers were blue-grey where the wet had dulled them and blush pink at the tips where the streetlight caught them. He wanted twelve pounds. I offered four and he laughed like a gate.

He said it had belonged to his mother, who had kept a stall on this same market in 1974 selling hair ribbons and second-hand gloves, and that she had worn it for the Christmas lights switch-on until the council made her stop. I didn't believe a word of it, but I paid the six pounds anyway, because the rain was down my collar and the hoop caught the light like a dropped spoon.

That night I hung it on the nail above the kettle. In the morning the ribbons had dried stiff and every feather lay the same way, as if someone had combed them in the dark. I left it there. It has grinned at me over the tea every morning since, and I have stopped asking where it was going.