Line drawing of a skull wearing a feathered headdress with two arrows, shown in cream linework on a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in feathered headdress with arrows

Black and grey · Flash

A side-profile skull wears a tall headdress of layered feathers, bound with a band across the brow, with two arrows rising from the top and one passing near the jaw. The design uses fine hatched and stippled linework to shade the feathers and bone, with no tonal fill beyond the cream lines and dark ground. The composition is centred on a plain black background with the skull facing left.

Skull Feather Headdress Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gerry Thackeray had run the shooting gallery at the end of Coldharbour Pier for thirty-one winters, and in all that time nobody had ever knocked the skull off its nail. It hung at the back of the stall on a pine post, a bone-coloured thing with a crest of grey feathers gone soft as moth wings. The rule was chalked on the board above it: bring the skull down and the prize was a tin of boiled sweets. Nobody managed it.

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The girl who came in on the Tuesday of the storm was not from the town. She had a canvas bag and wet hair, and she paid her two shillings in coins, counting them twice. She took the bow without looking at it, nocked an arrow the way someone does who learnt on a hard lawn, and fired three times in quick succession. The first arrow sang past the skull. The second clipped a feather. The third went through the eye socket and rang against the back board, and the nail gave up its grip with a sound like a line snapping.

Gerry didn't ask where she'd learnt. He was looking at the skull lying in the sawdust, at the arrow standing through its jaw. She handed it back to him, and he saw she had written something on the underside of the crest in pencil: a boat's name, the Maud Ellery, and a date three years gone. He had sold the Ellery's engine to a man called Tom Ellery, who had gone out in March and not come back.

He nailed the skull up that evening with the arrow still in it and left the sweets where they were. Some mornings after, the tin was gone and a single grey feather lay on the counter, dry and pale as bread.