Black and grey line drawing of two stacked skulls facing each other with stippled shading and two sparkle motifs, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Two skulls facing each other with sparkles

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two skulls stacked vertically, each in profile and turned towards the other, with a small four-pointed sparkle and a smaller sparkle at the upper left. The linework is bold and even, with grey stippled shading inside the eye sockets and along the lower curves of the skull forms. The design is rendered in black ink on white with no colour, and the composition is centred on a plain background with a soft grey shadow beneath.

Skull Sparkle Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been dead eleven years when I found the note tucked inside his skull, and I have not yet decided whether he meant it as a joke. I was the one who lifted the bones out of the old charnel room at Saint Oswin's that winter, when the damp got into the north wall and the abbot wanted the niche cleared before the masons came. There were two hundred and six skulls on those shelves, each labelled in faded ink with a name and a year, and I washed every one in a bucket of vinegar water because the rule said nothing could be thrown out unwashed.

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Anselm's skull and Tobias's had been set on the same shelf, though their slips were separate. Tobias had died of the fever the spring after Anselm, and whoever stacked them had turned them so they faced one another, jaw near jaw, like two men about to share a secret across the refectory table. I did not want to part them. So I wrote to the prior, who was in Lincoln and too tired to answer, and I went looking for the little star-shaped tin Anselm had cut to amuse the novices, the one he used to polish the reliquary brass.

The note inside Anselm's skull was folded small and said only: Tobias owes me a game of draughts. Keep the board. Beneath it, in a different hand, someone had drawn two tiny stars.

I put them back facing each other. When the prior came, he said nothing about the rule, and I think he was glad of it.