Flash sheet of ten black outline drawings of tribal masks in a grid on a white background, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ten tribal mask line drawings

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows ten stylised mask designs arranged in a grid on a plain white background. Each mask is drawn in bold black outline with simple patterned detailing such as hatching, dots, scrolls and geometric bands, and no shading. The masks vary in shape, from round and oval to elongated and framed, and the sheet has an even, evenly spaced composition.

Mask Face Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen weeks out from the Gold Coast with the manifest folded in your shirt and ten carved masks lashed in a crate below the forecastle. The purser has told you twice that a crate of faces brings bad weather, and twice you have told him the cook's pig is worse luck. Every evening, once the watch is set, you take a lamp down and count them against the list in your own hand.

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Round ones first, then the ovals, then the long ones with their narrow chins. The round mask with the sun-coil brow is your favourite, because its eyes are two spirals that seem to close slowly whenever the lamp swings. The framed one in the top corner has a band of hatched lines across its forehead, and you have learned to count those too: forty-one, forty-one, forty-one. The sea keeps rocking the crate, and the faces keep their patience.

On the ninth night of the gale the lashing gives. Masks slide across the boards like dropped plates, and you go after them on your knees, hands full of sailcloth and splinters. You count ten. Then you count again, and there are still ten, but the one with the braided crest has a second row of dots you do not remember drawing, cut fresh into the wood as if someone had been busy in the dark.

You do not tell the purser. You wedge the crate shut, nail the lid down, and say nothing when he asks whether the faces are whole. Dublin is six weeks off. When the dealer finally unwraps them in a warm shop on the quay, you stand at the back and watch him turn each one to the window, and you are not surprised when he sighs and says the braided one is the finest of the lot.