Black and grey line drawing of a bird skull with a wheat sprig, a crown of dots and small stars, labelled Virgo, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Virgo bird skull with wheat sprig

Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey ink drawing of a bird skull with a long beak, set against a wheat stalk, a crown-like arc of petal shapes and radiating dots, and small four-pointed stars. The skull is shaded with fine hatching and stippling, with grey wash on the beak and eye socket, while the wheat and crown use crisp linework. The composition is centred on the skull, with the word Virgo and a short quote printed in serif and italic type beneath.

Wheat Crown Star Dot Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the sacks again by eight, so the wheat came out of Pell's stall smelling of the canal, and I was the one who had to say so. I was the one who took the coins, too, which put me at the till beside the old crow skull nailed above the tea urn. Pell's father hung it there for luck. It had a crown of brass tacks wired to its brow and a beak gone the grey of wet slate, and every trader on Saltergate Market knew it was the one thing under our tin roof that never got damp.

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Thursdays brought Mr Aske. He bought a half-stone of wheat he didn't need, and he talked while I weighed it. He told me about the debt his brother was hiding, the woman in Leeds he had never written back to, the tenner he'd lifted from the Co-op float as a boy. I listened because the rain was loud and nobody else was buying. Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to keep anything for myself. Every secret that came across the scales was one more thing I carried, and I was tired of carrying them for people who never asked me to.

Then one Thursday he didn't come. Pell found a paper bag on the counter, paid for, folded twice, with a line in pencil: Keep the one I didn't say.

I didn't open it. I tucked it under the skull's jaw, where the wet wouldn't reach, and let the rain keep on at the tin above us, loud enough that nobody could hear me not telling.