Colour tattoo of an animal skull with red poppies and green fern fronds on the side of a person's ribs, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal skull with poppies on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an animal skull with open jaws and visible teeth, shaded in soft greys with dark outlines. Three red poppy flowers and buds on thin stems sit beside the skull, with dark green fern-like fronds fanning downwards beneath it. The close photograph is taken across the side of the torso, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Skull Animal skull Poppy Flower Fern Leaves Bud

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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 rain had come in over the river before dawn, and by the time the stalls on Fenbridge Market were half shuttered, Nell Parrish was still selling poppies from a tin bucket. They were the papery red kind that drop their petals if you look at them wrong. Nobody else would stand out in such weather, so the fox found her easily.

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He came up the wet cobbles with his head low, carrying nothing, and asked what she wanted for three flowers. Nell told him the price was one true thing said aloud before the lamps were lit. The fox considered this the way foxes consider hens. He said he had a true thing, but it was heavy, and she would have to carry it home. She said she had carried worse up the hill. He laid his jaw on the trestle, and it was only bone, clean and grey and grinning, every tooth still in its place. "I was never a thief," he said. "I only ever took what was left out."

Nell thought about it for the length of one cold drip from the awning. Then she wrapped the skull in her apron, took it home, and set it on the windowsill beside a jar of water. Each morning another poppy opened from its bud on the stem, and fern fronds crept down the sill as though someone had planted them in the night.

The market kept its rain and Nell kept her stall. When customers asked where her flowers came from, she said the fox had paid in full, and that a true thing, once said, does not need saying twice.