Neo-traditional colour tattoo of an animal skull with red, yellow and blue roses and a ribbon banner, on the outer thigh.

Animal skull and roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold animal skull with exposed teeth sits at the centre, framed by red, yellow and blue roses with green leaves. A ribbon banner along the bottom carries a partly legible line of script, and the skull is shaded in tan and brown with black outlining. The bright, saturated colour and thick outlines are set against plain skin in a close, straight-on photo.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Skull Animal skull Rose Banner Teeth Leaves Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skiff Mercy Vane went out at the turn of the tide with a dog's skull lashed to her prow, the way the Hollin fleet had always done it. Old Jory Pell had carried that skull since his grandfather's day, yellow-toothed and cracked at the brow, and he swore it could smell a shoal through fog.

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The fog came down on the third night. The men called to one another and got no answer back, only the sea breathing against the hull. Jory took the tiller and heard a voice from the water asking him what he used to be, before the sea made him its fisherman. He told it plainly: a boy who hauled bait barrows along the quay, nothing more. The voice did not care for that answer, and the water rose cold at the bow.

Then the skull's jaw clacked open on its lashing, though nothing had touched it, and the boat swung toward a sound that Jory knew for gulls over the Hollin light. He understood then that the dog had been the one answering all along, and that a dead dog's bones remember the way home better than any man's pride.

At first light the women of the harbour found the Mercy Vane tied at the slip with her nets full. Along the sea wall they had planted roses that spring: red for the boats still out, yellow for the ones come back, blue for the men who had gone quiet on purpose. Jory's yellow bloom was the first to open.