Raven Skull Earring — flat silhouette dangle, mirrored pair, no supports

A raven (Corvus corax) skull in lateral profile as a flat silhouette dangle earring, printed in one piece on the bed — no supports, no multi-material, no hardware beyond a jump ring and an ear wire.

What makes it read as a skull

Three cues, all of them in the outline:

• a large domed braincase — about 40% of the skull length — pierced by an Ø8 mm orbit, which is the single biggest read cue at this size

• the heavy raven culmen: deep at the base, near-straight for two thirds, then a decurved hooked tip, with an Ø2.2 mm nare (nostril) hole at the beak base. Deep-and-hooked is what separates a raven from a crow.

• an open jaw slot. The mandible is fused to the skull only at the articulation, then rises and tracks the beak with a 1.4–3.2 mm gap the whole way forward, stopping 5 mm short of the hook so the beak overhangs it. Without that slot the shape reads as a bird head, not a skull — it is the detail worth protecting if you rescale.

The pair is mirrored, not duplicated

A profile is chiral in wear, not in print. Two copies of the same STL give you two skulls facing the same way — one of them looks inward when worn. So the set ships both handednesses:

• raven_skull_earring.stl — right-facing skull

• raven_skull_earring_mirror.stl — left-facing skull

Print one of each.

Specifications

• ~25 × 41 mm drop, 1.8 mm thick, 0.93 g per earring

• Integrated bail lug with an Ø2.2 mm jump-ring hole (1.25 mm wall around it)

• One linear-extruded silhouette: one solid body, watertight, flat bottom

• Zero overhangs — the whole part is a prism standing on the bed

Printing

• Flat on the bed, face up, no supports

• 0.12–0.2 mm layers, 3 walls; the part is thinner than 3 walls of infill so it comes out effectively solid whatever you set

• PLA or PETG. A brim helps: the beak tip has a small footprint and is the one place a knock-off can start

• Both photos in the gallery are the same two STLs — a black pair and a bone pair, straight off the plate, unsanded

Wearing it

Hang it from a jump ring, not directly off the ear wire. The bail hole is Ø2.2 mm, which takes a ring of about 1.5 mm wire comfortably. At 0.93 g the pair is lighter than most metal dangles of the same size.

Making it yours — the OpenSCAD source

raven_skull_earring.scad is the real source, fully parametric and self-contained (no library imports). Every outline is a hull() of circles, so anything you change stays smooth. The knobs, all at the top of the file:

Export from the command line — each of these writes a printable STL:

the stock right-facing earring

openscad -o raven.stl -D 'part="earring"' raven_skull_earring.scad

a daintier ~31 mm drop

openscad -o raven_small.stl -D 'scale_f=0.65' raven_skull_earring.scad

a thicker, chunkier 2.6 mm plate

openscad -o raven_thick.stl -D 'thickness=2.6' raven_skull_earring.scad

both handednesses laid out on one plate, ready to slice

openscad -o raven_pair.stl -D 'part="pair"' raven_skull_earring.scad

Two things to know before you rescale:

• The jaw slot is the limit, not the beak. It narrows with scale_f; it is still 1.0 mm — printable with a 0.4 mm nozzle — at scale_f = 0.63, and below that the mandible fuses to the beak and the skull stops reading. If you want it smaller than that, raise the slot instead of shrinking further.

• hang_angle is tuned, not arbitrary. −55° puts the bail topmost and very nearly over the centroid, so the skull hangs beak-down instead of swinging to one side. If you move bail_pos, re-check how it hangs.

part="flat" gives you the raw 2D outline if you would rather take the silhouette somewhere else entirely — a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, or an inlay in a larger piece.