Colour realism tattoo of an animal skull with pink and red roses on the forearm near the elbow, against a blurred floral dress and kitchen background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skull and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman's forearm, bent at the elbow, shows a colour tattoo of an animal skull with pink and red roses across its lower part. The skull has soft brown and peach shading, with lighter highlights on the bone and some yellowish shapes above it. The background is out of focus, showing a floral dress and a green worktop, which keeps attention on the tattoo.

Realism Forearm Skull Animal skull Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had lain in the machair grass since the gales, bleached the colour of old candle wax, and Nessa Corrie would not let the dog have it. She carried it up the track in both hands, past the sheep pens and the shut-up kirk, its jaw knocking once against her knee. Her father called her a fool for keeping bones. Her mother called her worse, but her mother had stopped looking toward the pier years ago, so Nessa took no notice of either of them.

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She scrubbed it in the rain barrel with washing soda until the grey came off and the bone turned warm and faintly pink. Then she set it on the sill of the cottage that had belonged to Isobel Dunn, the schoolmistress who left for Glasgow forty years back and sent a rose cutting in a biscuit tin every spring after that. Nessa had kept the cuttings alive out of stubbornness. By June they were climbing the wall, red and pale pink, and she began pushing the blooms into the eye sockets and the gap where the teeth had been, so the flowers seemed to spill out of the skull's mouth like something it had been saying all along.

Calum from the ferry stopped by in July with a tin of shortbread and a sour face. Bad luck, he said, a skull with flowers in it. Nessa told him the thing had spent a whole winter facing the sea and had earned a change of scenery. He laughed and went off down the track.

In October the roses had gone to hips and the petals lay brown in the sill's cracks. The skull still faced west, toward the water and the empty slip where the boat used to dock. Nessa lifted it, turned it slowly until its hollow gaze looked east across the moor, toward the mainland road and the bus that ran to Glasgow, and left it there for the first frost.