Black and grey engraved flash of two skulls, one in a top hat and tailcoat and one in a feathered bonnet, drawn in fine hatched linework on a white background.

Two Victorian skulls in top hat and feathered bonnet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

Two skulls are drawn side by side as a flash design. The left skull wears a tall top hat and a formal jacket with a waistcoat, and the right skull wears a wide bonnet with a large bow and tall feathers, with curled hair showing beneath. The work uses dense hatching, stippling and fine engraved linework in black ink on white, with no colour.

Traditional Skull Top hat Feather Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatter's shop on Cloth Fair kept two wooden blocks in its window that nobody bought, a gentleman and a lady, and Mrs Ottoline Pike dusted them every Monday with a goose feather, as her husband had done before his cough took him in the winter of sixty-one. The top hat on the gentleman had gone brown at the brim. The lady's bonnet still held its black feathers, though one had been mended with a sliver of whalebone.

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On the night the bonnet came back to her, Walter Hale stood in the doorway with rain running from his collar and a hat box under each arm. He had made both sets of goods himself, he said, for two customers who had paid in full and then died, and he could not bear to sell them to strangers. Ottoline asked what the customers had been like. He said the gentleman had never once taken his hat off indoors, and the lady had kept her bonnet on at the tea table because she would not be seen without the bow.

They carried the blocks upstairs and fitted the hats by candlelight. The top hat sat square at once, but the bonnet would not settle until Ottoline unpicked the ribbon at the nape and found a folded letter sewn flat into the crown. It was addressed to whoever opened the box. The lady had written that she forgave the gentleman for the cards he lost at the Argyll Rooms, and that the feathers were black because she had grown tired of mourning in grey.

In the morning they stood the pair in the window again, the bow pinned straight. Someone stopped in the drizzle to read the card beneath them, which said only: Sold together, or not at all.