Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feathered headdress, side profile

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A side-profile human skull wears a large feathered headdress with a beaded band and a circular medallion at the temple. The feathers are rendered with fine hatched linework and solid black tips, while stippled dots shade the skull and the lower feathers. The design is in black ink on a white background and is centred on the page.

Blackwork Dotwork Skull Headdress Feather Medallion

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came up from the quay on a Tuesday, stencilled with a consignee's name that had been scratched out and written over twice. Mabel Frane was the only one in the warehouse who could tell a primary feather from a secondary by touch, so Mr Brandt set the crate on her bench and told her to count. Inside, packed in straw gone the colour of weak tea, was a skull, cleaned and polished and set on a varnished stand, wearing a headdress of plumes so long they coiled in the straw like rope.

Keep reading

She counted them by lamplight over three evenings, rolling each quill between thumb and forefinger and checking the black tips for splits. There were two hundred and twelve. The beaded band had a pattern of stepped triangles, and the round medallion at its side was stitched with a wheel of eight spokes, dulled from handling. Each night when she locked up, she found a single feather lying on her blotter that had not been there before, freshly oiled, its tip still dark, and she never knew whether it had drifted off the crate or been set down on purpose.

On the fourth night she laid the feathers out in order along the long table, the way her mother had laid out a hand of patience. Two hundred and twelve, she wrote in the ledger. Then she crossed the figure out and wrote two hundred and thirteen, and a line below that, and a third figure she did not understand. She took the feather from the blotter, fitted it into the band beside the medallion, and sat with the lamp turned low.

In March the crate went out again, bound for an address she was careful not to read, and the ledger balanced to the last quill.