Black dotwork drawing of a skull framed by a mandala and scrolling ornament, a tattoo design with no placement shown.

Skull within a dotwork mandala

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A human skull sits at the centre of a symmetrical design, with a large mandala above and a smaller mandala below. Scrolling acanthus-style leaves curl around the skull's sides. The shading is built from stippled dots, giving the skull and ornaments soft tonal depth alongside solid black linework. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with the motif centred and filling the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Skull Mandala Scrollwork Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps had found the windfalls before the men did, so Edwin Marl walked the rows at dawn with a bucket and a stick, knocking bruised apples into the long grass. In the dry August of that year he found a skull under the old Bramley, half sunk in the leaf mould, its crown turned up to the sky as if it had been waiting for rain to wash it clean.

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He carried it up to the house. His wife Agnes told him to bury it or boil it, and he did neither. He set it on the kitchen windowsill and went out to the press. When he came back each morning, the sill was ringed with apple pips, laid in circles, a larger ring around a smaller one, and the bone at the edges had a lace of dots on it, as fine as frost. The village said the orchard had a visitor. Old Pell, who made the cider, said the dead keep count of what ripens.

Agnes counted the rings one morning while Edwin slept. There were nine. She said nothing until he came down, then pointed at the sill and at the calendar nailed beside it, where the harvest days were marked in her neat hand. Nine harvests since the orchard was planted by his grandfather. Each ring was a year the trees had given their fruit, and each dot was a pip that had been taken and not returned.

On the first frost Edwin took the skull back out to the Bramley and put it in the roots. The next autumn the tree bore so heavily that the boughs had to be propped with forked sticks. Every apple had five dark seeds at its core, set in a ring, and the Marls have cut the fruit open ever since to count them, and leave the one with the most for the ground.