Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an animal skull wreathed in a peony and leaves, placed on the outer thigh.

Animal skull and peony on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an animal skull, possibly a cat or small mammal, with a large peony bloom behind it, two leaves above, and loose petals and leaves around the edges. The skull is outlined in fine black linework, with stippled dotwork shading on the bone, the flower and the leaves. The design is centred on the thigh, filling most of the frame against plain skin.

Dotwork Blackwork Botanical Thigh Skull Animal skull Peony Flower Leaves Petal

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The florist on Kettering Road has propped her back door open with a bucket of peonies, and by the time you reach the bins their petals are already browning at the edges. It is gone eleven. The rain has thinned to a mist that hangs under the streetlamps, and the bin lorry is due at six, so you have seven hours to decide what to do with the things Mrs Okafor left behind when she moved to her daughter's in Croydon.

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Inside, the cold room hums. On the steel shelf, between a tray of wire stems and a jar of rusted secateurs, sits a small skull wrapped in a tea towel. She told you once that it belonged to Biscuit, a grey tom who slept on the till for nineteen years, and that she had boiled him clean in a stockpot on the back ring while her husband pretended not to watch. A loop of green florist's wire still holds the jaw. You lift it and the tea towel comes away damp, smelling of cut stems and bleach.

You had meant to leave it with the peonies. Instead you wrap it in tissue paper, tuck it inside your coat, and walk home past the shuttered chip shop and the bus shelter where someone has pasted a missing poster for a spaniel. At the corner of Harcourt Road a petal slips from your pocket, where you have also stuffed three blooms, and sticks to the wet pavement beside your shoe like a small pale hand.

At home you set the skull on the windowsill facing the street, and beside it the three peonies in a jam jar of tap water. By morning the flowers will have opened to the lamplight, and from the pavement below the bone will look as though it has always been waiting for something to grow out of it.