Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an animal skull surrounded by leaves and berries, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skull with foliage on thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cranium and jaw of an animal, possibly a small mammal, sit at the centre of the design with fine line detail on the bone plates and teeth. Dense leaves, branching stems, clustered berries and a few star-shaped leaves wrap around the skull, with stippled dots adding texture to the shadows. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, shown in a close, slightly angled photo against plain skin and a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Thigh Skull Animal skull Leaves Foliage Berry Flower Stem

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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

Put your hand flat on the bench, boy, and leave the bone where it lies until I say. That one came out from under the old yew by the wall the winter the mill race froze. Brother Osric found it with hawthorn berries still caught between its teeth, bright as sealing wax, and he brought it to me because I was the one who kept the physic garden and the one who had buried the most mistakes.

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The abbot wanted it thrown in the lime pit. He said a skull in the garden invites the devil to sit down and talk. I told him the devil had never once needed an invitation, and that a dead thing teaches more than a live sermon. So I scraped it clean, boiled it in lye, and set it on this bench under the horse chestnut, where the leaves come out each spring like open palms.

You are wondering what it died of. So was I. Look at the jaw. It had been at the bryony roots, the ones I hang in the infirmary for the dropsy. A little too much, and the thing that heals becomes the thing that stops the heart. Nobody in this house could say whether the marten knew the difference, only that it came back three nights running for the same red root.

So we keep it here, among the blackberry and the wild sage, where the novices can see it every time they reach for a jar. The berries grow over its eyes every autumn and I never cut them back. Tomorrow you will weigh the dried bryony for Brother Osric. Weigh it carefully, wash your hands twice, and then come and tell me what you saw in the bone.