Black and grey dotwork skull tattoo on a shoulder, with a scalloped crown filled with raindrop dots and wave lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with raindrops on the shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull tattoo covers the top of the shoulder, with a scalloped crown and rows of solid black raindrop shapes across the cranium. The eye sockets and jaw are outlined with fine hatched and stippled shading, and wavy lines sit between the crown and the face. The image is shown in black ink and grey tones against pale skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Shoulder Skull Raindrop Scallop Wave Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came in off the Minch the week the Margaret Ann missed her tide, and by the Tuesday sixteen boats were tied up along the quay at Mallaig with nobody willing to say the word lost out loud. I kept the net loft then, which meant I was the one men told things first, usually climbing the stairs with their caps in their hands and nothing to hand over but the caps.

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Tam Lowrie had drawn the skull on the back of a tide table the winter his wife left, and he never explained it beyond saying a man's head is only weather with bone round it. The crown was the sea itself, scalloped like the rings on a dredge, and the rain fell from it in fat black drops that never ran down into the face. Where the brow should have been there were waves, and below them the eye holes went dark as a wet hold. He pinned it above the stove and told the boys not to touch it, as the paper would tear.

On the Wednesday I went down to the pier before light and counted the boats coming in through the mist, the way Tam had taught me to count drops on a page: one, then a gap, then another. Fifteen came. I counted them twice. The sixteenth was a lamp at the mouth of the bay, low and steady, and it took until nine o'clock to be certain it was not a star.

That night the rain beaded on the loft window in rows like the ones on Tam's crown, and I stood at the stove with his drawing and counted them, stopping at the one that would not fall. Nobody in the fleet mentioned the Margaret Ann's late tide again. Tam's skull kept its rain above the waves, where he had always put it.