Black ink dotwork drawing of a skull inside a geometric mandala design, shown in two side-by-side views, with no placement on the body.

Skull within a dotwork mandala

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two panels of the same design: a human skull centred inside concentric rings and a radiating mandala frame with pointed diamond and spike shapes. The skull and frame are built from fine stippling and dots, with solid black linework and striped bands around the skull. The drawing is in black ink on off-white paper, and the left panel is a close-up of the right.

Dotwork Geometric Skull Mandala Geometric pattern Dot Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost lifted the skull out of the lower field the week before Candlemas, when the drain at Hobb's Rise split open and the ground gave up what it had been keeping. I found it with my boot. It sat in the mud grinning at the sky as if it had been waiting for someone to take the trouble, and I stood there with the ewes steaming behind me until my fingers stopped working.

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Nan's old ledger was in the kitchen drawer, and I carried the skull in there in a feed sack because I didn't know what else to do. Inside the back cover, drawn in ink so fine it looked like rime on glass, was a wheel of rings: a skull at the heart, a crown of petals, and spikes running out to the edges like the points of a compass that had forgotten which way north was. Under it she had written, in her wobbling capitals, KEEP THE CENTRE DRY.

The constable came on Tuesday in a car that slid sideways into the gate. He studied the drawing for a long time, then me, and said the bones had been down there longer than either of us had been alive. He asked whether Nan ever mentioned a Mr Abney, who walked the moors with a surveyor's chain and never came back. She hadn't. But I found pencil lines under the ink, rubbed out and redrawn, and the dots of the outer ring matched the rain pattern on the old drain cover.

I buried him under the hawthorn on Sunday with the drawing folded in his hands, then sat down with a pencil and worked out the spikes she had left open. Every morning since, I have walked the lower field counting the rings, one gate at a time, and the frost keeps its distance from the centre.