Black ink line drawing of a side-facing skull wearing a feathered headdress with a heart-shaped pendant, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Skull in feathered headdress line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A side-profile skull wears a long feathered headdress with a beaded band, a heart-shaped centre piece, and braided and fringed trailing cords. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatching and shading on the feathers and skull, and the drawing is done in black ink on white paper. The composition fills the sheet, with the skull at the lower left and the headdress sweeping up and back to the right.

Skull Headdress Feather Heart Bead Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had inked feathers for eleven nights when the proof came back from the printer with the heart still blank. It sat in the centre of the sheet like a window with nothing behind it, and every time she lifted her pen above it her wrist went stiff. The commission was from a Leeds tattoo supply shop that wanted a stencil-ready master, and the man who ordered it, a Mr Pennock with a shaking voice on the phone, had asked for his late wife's initials in the heart. Maud had said no. Some things were better left clean.

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By the twelfth night the feathers had grown past the edge of the paper's margin. She counted forty-one tips along the left and forty-two along the right before she switched off the lamp, and she told herself she had simply drawn them more closely than she remembered. The braided cords at the bottom trailed towards the floorboards, and the fringe had thickened into something like wet hair.

In the morning there was a new line of ink running down the cord, fine as a hair, and it stopped a finger's width above the skirting board. She had not drawn it. The bottle was capped and the nib was dry. Beside it, on the blotter, lay a single bead of dark glass that had not been there the night before.

She finished the braid to the edge of the sheet and no further. Then she wrote on the back in small square capitals, LEAVE THE CENTRE CLEAN, and posted it to Mr Pennock with the bead taped to the corner, and she never heard from him again.