Black and grey dotwork skull with a beaded, draped chain ornament tattooed across the centre of the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with beaded drape across the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A dotwork skull sits at the centre of the chest, with stippled shading on the cranium and fine solid linework defining the eye sockets and teeth. Above and around it runs a fine-line ornamental arch with hanging beaded strands and teardrop pendants. The design is entirely black ink in greys, and it is framed symmetrically across the sternum.

Dotwork Chest Skull Bead Chain Teardrop Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow closed the pass on the third night of Advent, and the Hollin Inn had three guests and one bed short of a fourth. Mother Agathe kept the cellar key on a string of jet beads her husband had brought back from the coast, each one worn smooth by thumbs.

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The stranger arrived at the shutters' creak, shaking snow from a coat that did not look wet. She asked for a room with a view of the road. Agathe gave her the attic under the eaves, and the stranger hung a drape of black beads across the window, slowly, teardrops clicking against the glass. The carter and the tinsmith's boy, who were sleeping by the hearth, noticed that the beads made no sound when the wind rose.

In the morning the carter was gone, his boots left steaming by the fire, and the boy would not say what he had seen on the stairs. Agathe climbed to the attic with bread and found the window bare. The beads lay on the boards in a neat arch, and at their centre sat a yellowed skull with one eye socket tipped toward the door, as if it were laughing at a joke only it had heard.

Agathe did not scream. She carried the skull down to the cellar, set it on the barrel of winter ale, and poured the first cup for it, as her husband's mother had taught her. The snow stopped by noon. The stranger was never seen on the road again, but every winter after, a single jet bead turned up in the bread, and nobody at the Hollin ever swallowed one.