Black and white pen and ink drawing of a grinning skull wearing an ornate crown, rendered with dense hatching as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull wearing a crown in pen and ink

Black and grey · Flash

A grinning human skull wears an ornate crown with jewelled settings and decorative detailing. The skull is drawn in fine pen and ink with dense cross-hatching that builds up shadow in the eye sockets, nose and jaw. The design is shown in black and white on a plain white background, centred and filling most of the frame.

Skull Crown

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's got no sense of manners tonight. You want the tale of the King of Gullwick Quay, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, with the gulls screaming outside to make the point. Hundred years back the harbour folk got tired of their mayor, a fat man named Josiah Pell who taxed the fish by the fin and the nets by the knot. So they sat in the back room of the Drowned Anchor and argued until the candles guttered. Nobody would stand for king, for nobody trusted anybody else with a crown.

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So they went down to the old charnel vault under St Brannoc's, where the bones of drowned men are stacked like firewood, and they took the skull of a sailor nobody had ever claimed. Some say he was a smuggler, some say a pirate, and the parish register says only that he came ashore in a barrel. The smith at the forge hammered a crown from a ship's bell and a pair of brass candlesticks, and they set three garnets in it that a widow gave up for the cause. Then they placed it on the skull and left it on the bench by the harbour wall, and they swore that whoever could lift the crown would rule the quay until the tide went out for the last time.

Do you know what happened? Nobody could lift it. Not Pell, not the fishwives, not the boy who thought he was clever. The crown just sat on that grinning skull and the skull grinned back at them, every one, as if it knew the joke. And the joke, my dear, is that the quay has been ruled ever since by whoever sits down and says nothing at all. Pell's great-great-grandson still wears the garnets on his watch chain. Mind the candle now.