Colour tattoo of an animal skull surrounded by purple and orange flowers and green leaves on a thigh, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Animal skull and flowers on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of an animal skull, seen from the side with its jaw open, sits at the centre of a cluster of flowers and leaves. Purple and orange blooms, small pink and mauve flowers and dark green leaves surround the skull, with bold black outlines and soft shading on the petals and bone. The tattoo covers the outer thigh, and a partial dark tattoo is visible at the top left against a blurred orange background.

Botanical Neo-trad Thigh Skull Animal skull Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bed nine rang at ten past three, which is the hour people ring for things they have stopped expecting to get. Mrs Heald wanted her tin. It was under the chair in her bag, a biscuit tin with a faded tartan lid, and she wanted me to open it and lift the thing out, because the morphine had softened her eyes and she could no longer read the labels.

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Inside, wrapped in a tea towel, was a fox skull. Its jaw hung open a little, as if it had been about to correct somebody. The bone had gone the colour of weak tea. "Ted found him under the hellebores along the lane," she said, "the year we moved in. Said the fox had died in the frost and the flowers had come up round him anyway. He thought that was very rude of them."

I laughed, and she smiled, and then she asked me to set it on the blanket so she could see the teeth. Down the corridor a pump alarm chimed and a trolley squeaked past the glass. Mrs Heald traced the jaw with one finger, slowly, the way you might read a list you wrote yourself. She talked until the window began to grey over the car park, mostly about Ted and the pansies he grew in old teacups along the sill, orange ones like poppies, and how he used to draw the whole garden on the backs of prescription slips.

Around six her breathing changed. I held her hand and counted it out, and she went quietly, the way the best of them do. I wrapped the skull in its towel and put the lid back on the tin. On the handover sheet, under personal effects, I wrote: one tin, tartan, contents to be returned to family. On paper it looked like nothing at all.