Black and grey pencil drawing of a cracked skull with a moth, two brushes and a dagger-like pencil, above a geometric mandala, shown as a tattoo design.

Skull, moth and mandala design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on paper of a cracked skull with a moth resting on its left side, two paintbrushes and a pencil piercing the top of the skull, and a dagger-like object passing across the jaw. A symmetrical geometric mandala with dotted and petal-shaped detail sits at the lower right of the skull. The work uses fine hatching and soft shading in black and grey, with pencils and a pen lying at the top right of the frame.

Geometric Realism Skull Moth Paintbrush Pencil Mandala Dagger

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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 officer at the gate has turned your sketchbook over three times now, as if the back cover might confess something. Behind you the coach has emptied onto the tarmac, and a man in a hi-vis tabard is counting suitcases with a biro. You know what he sees: a skull in graphite, a moth with its wings spread like a hinge, two brushes and a pencil stuck in the crown of the bone, as though someone had tried to make the thing write its own obituary.

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"Artist?" he says. "Tattoo?" You say yes to the second one, which is true of the drawing and not of you. The mandala in the lower corner took eleven evenings in a rented room in Calais, each petal a small argument with the ruler, each dot placed with a pin you had boiled over a kettle. Nothing in it is contraband. Nothing in it is anything but patience.

He holds the page up to the strip light. The dagger across the jaw catches the glare, and for a second the drawing looks less like a design than a map of somewhere you are not allowed to go. You think of your father, who said you would never make a living from pencils, and who would have loved the cracked crown and hated the moth. You think of the pencil by the rain-streaked window, the one you never sharpened.

He stamps the page, hands the book back and says, "Go on, then." You walk through the gate with the sketchbook under your arm, and at the far end of the car park you open it again, just to see the skull still grinning up at the grey sky, unbothered by anyone's borders.