Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feathered headdress in profile

Black and grey · Flash

A skull is drawn in side profile, facing left, and wears a full headdress of long, layered feathers that sweep back and down. The linework is fine and sketched, with cross-hatched shading across the bone, the feather quills and the plumes. The image is rendered only in black and grey on a plain white background, with the composition centred on the skull and headdress.

Skull Headdress Feather Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The printer at Sheerness has finally paid me, so you can stop reminding me about the rent. The commission was a peculiar one. Mr Hale wanted a memento mori for his late brother's funeral card, a skull in profile with something of the brother's character in it. I asked what the man had been like. Hale said he never sat still, and never came home from the mudflats without a pocketful of gull feathers.

So I drew him as Hale described: a skull turned to the left, its nose bones sharp as a clerk's pen, and above it a crown of quills swept back as if a stiff wind had caught them. Gull, heron, a few grey plovers. I spent three evenings on the feathers alone, cross-hatching each barb until the paper went the colour of wet slate. On the last morning Hale's wife stood at my elbow and asked whether the plumes would blow off the card when it was handled.

I told her only the ink would move, and only if the plate was pulled too hot. She laughed for the first time since the funeral, then asked for a second copy for herself, framed, so that he could keep on going somewhere.

Your loving brother, Tom