Black ink line drawing of a woman with flowing hair and a third eye, holding a skull, with two bats above, shown as a neo-traditional tattoo flash design on paper.

Woman with skull and bats design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a woman with long, windswept hair drawn in fine flowing lines, a third eye on her forehead and a nose ring, holding an ornate skull in clawed fingers. Two bats sit in the upper corners, and the skull has light blue-grey shading and decorative scrollwork. The image is mostly black linework on pale paper, with a hand holding black fineliner pens at the left edge.

Neo-trad Woman Skull Bat Third eye Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off Scarrow Holm had not dropped in nine days, and Mirren Lusk had stopped trying to tame her hair. It streamed sideways over her shoulders like kelp pulled out on the ebb, and the gulls gave up trying to land on the chapel roof. Her mother had called the third eye a gift, though no one on the island would say so aloud. It opened only at dusk, when the bats came out of the church tower and wheeled above the harbour wall.

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On the night the ferry failed to come, Mirren climbed the cliff path with a lamp and the old skull that hung in the chapel vestry. It had come off a wreck in her grandfather's time, scrolled across the brow with a pattern of leaves that no one could name. She held it up to the wind the way her mother had taught her, cupped in both hands, and asked the sea to show her what it wanted.

The sea showed her the ferry, lying on its side two miles out, its lights still burning under the water. Three men were climbing the rigging. Mirren counted them twice, then went down to the slipway and lit every tar barrel the harbour owned.

By morning the bats had gone quiet and the skull sat on the windowsill, polished where her fingers had held it. Nobody on Scarrow Holm asked her again why she kept it. They simply left the lamp burning in the tower, and when the wind dropped at last, Mirren's hair fell flat and ordinary against her neck, and she was glad of it.