Black and grey dotwork flash design of a woman with flowing hair, a starfish, bubbles and a skull on her cheek, drawn in ink on textured paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with starfish and skull, dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a woman's head and upper body with long, flowing hair entwined with a starfish, bubbles and sea creatures. A skull is rendered in stippled dotwork on one side of her face, and her ribs and a hand appear across the chest. The image is in black ink with grey stippling on a pale, textured background, with a composition that fills the page from head to chest.

Dotwork Woman Starfish Bubble Skull Hair Sea creature Ribs Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I am Ysolde Brine, keeper of the drowned register in the kingdom of Morrowmere, and it is my office to write down everything the sea gives back. Last autumn it gave back a bell, green as bottle glass, with a starfish clamped to its lip like a stubborn hand that would not let go. The court wanted it melted for fish-hooks. The Lord of Tides wanted it hung in the great hall as a trophy. I wanted to know who had rung it last.

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Old Mabry, the diver who brought it up, swore the clapper had been swapped for something smaller. When I pried the bell open in the cellar, there was a skull where the iron tongue should have been, its jaw bound shut with a silver wire. Bubbles kept rising from it even though the bucket of brine it sat in was perfectly still. I spent three nights with a lamp and a needle, teasing silt from the eye sockets, while the lamp-oil ran low and the sea knocked at the cellar grate like a neighbour who wanted in.

On the fourth night the sockets were clean, and a line of tiny letters had surfaced on the crown: ELEANOR, and beneath it, in a second hand, come home. I rowed out at slack water the next morning and hung the bell from the Carrow Deep buoy with my own hands. Its note rolled down through the weed like a long sigh. Starfish slid off the rim and drifted away in a slow spiral, and far below a pale hand lifted through the kelp, opened, and let something silver fall. I wrote it in the register under RETURNED, and then, for the first time in forty years, I wrote my own name in the column for debts the sea had paid.