Black and grey skull wearing a feathered headdress, tattooed on the upper arm in a stippled dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feathered headdress on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A human skull with a feathered headdress framed by a zigzag band across the forehead. The skull and headdress are built from fine black linework and dense stippled shading, with lighter greys giving the bone its form. The design fills the upper arm in a symmetrical, circular composition, with the feather tips and wispy hanging ornaments extending outward.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink in the scriptorium at Hollin Abbey had gone to crust by Michaelmas, and Brother Aldous still would not let anyone thin it with water. He sat under the broken east window with his quills fanned behind his ears like a crown and copied the tithe rolls one dot at a time, because his master had told him that a line can lie but a dot cannot.

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The old prior kept a skull on his desk, yellow as a tallow candle, which he called the Recorder. Each night he turned it to face the page. That spring Aldous noticed the rolls disagreeing with the parish book: a farm counted twice, a widow's acres shrunk to the width of a thumb. He stippled his corrections in grey wash until the margins looked like frost on a gate, and the prior smiled and said the Recorder was pleased.

In November the prior was found at the foot of the bell tower, his pockets full of loose quills and his fingers stained the colour of old rust. Aldous carried the rolls to the dean. The dean held them to the window and read the dots by daylight, and there, beneath every false sum, were the prior's own small marks, faint as breath, matching the widow's acres to the inch.

Aldous went back to the scriptorium that night. He dipped a quill, wrote one name in dots, and then turned the Recorder to face the wall so it could not watch him finish.

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