Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a skull wearing a red, blue and purple feathered headdress on the outer thigh.

Skull in feathered headdress on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A skull in profile wears a feathered headdress with red, purple and blue plumes, beaded bands and trailing ribbons. The skull is outlined with soft shading on its eye socket and jaw, while the feathers use layered colour and fine linework. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a thigh, with a hand and orange clothing visible at the top edge.

Neo-trad Thigh Skull Headdress Feather Ribbon Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mo,

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The lift on Carrow House has been out since Tuesday, so I'm writing this on the back of a council notice while I wait for the engineer, who has never once turned up before a Friday. Something came up the stairs this morning that you'd have liked. Mrs Abara from flat 41 found a bin bag on the eighth-floor landing with a feather headdress inside it, red and purple and a blue that looked dyed in a bath, plus a skull. Plaster, painted white, with the jaw hinged so it clacked when you picked it up.

She wanted it binned. I said it wasn't mine to bin. So it's on my desk now, in the lost property cupboard, labelled with a Post-it that says "skull, feathers, do not rattle".

Two days later a lad came to the desk asking for "the thing with the birds on it". He wouldn't give his name at first. He just kept saying it was his nan's, from a carnival in Margate in the seventies, and she'd made him promise to keep it in the family. I asked him why it had been in a bin bag. He shrugged and said the lift had been out before too.

I gave it back. Don't ask me why I did. He held the plumes up against the window and the light came through them like a church window, and for a second the whole stairwell smelled of lemon polish and somebody's frying onions. Then he tucked the skull under his arm like a football and went down the stairs two at a time.