Back tattoo in black and grey shading, showing a large skull surrounded by outlined roses and swirling clouds, in a Japanese-influenced style, across the upper and mid back.

Back piece with skull and roses in black and grey

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a shaded skull at the centre, framed by outlined roses, a string of beads and scrolling swirl shapes. The linework is bold and the shading is soft and grey, with dark areas behind the skull giving it depth. The design fills most of the back, with roses at the shoulders and lower sides balancing the central skull.

Japanese Botanical Back Skull Rose Bead Swirl Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The beads went everywhere when Auntie Mags's rosary snapped during the first dance. Forty-odd guests in the Bexhill function room dropped to their knees on the parquet, pale blue skirts and rented waistcoats crouched together, while the band played on regardless and the couple turned slow circles above us. I was the only one who saw where the string had parted, because I had been standing by the bar watching the crowd the way my uncle taught me, with a pint going warm in my hand.

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Uncle Ray ran a sign-writing business out of a lock-up in Hastings for thirty years. He painted shopfronts in gold leaf and, on the days nobody paid him, skulls and roses inside his ledger covers. He used to say a skull keeps the roses honest, and a rose keeps the skull from getting too pleased with itself. I thought of that as I crawled under the top table with my phone torch, picking up beads that had rolled against shoes, a cake stand, the bass drum.

I found the last one nudged up against the leg of the best man's chair. Forty-one beads counted into a Tupperware lid. Auntie Mags was not crying, she was furious, and her hand shook as she held out her palm. I had a length of fishing line in my jacket pocket, because Uncle Ray had insisted I carry one for exactly this kind of mess, and I knotted the string back together with his double overhand while the bride laughed at us both from her chair.

When I handed it back, Mags counted the beads with her thumb and stopped at one with a chip in it. "Keep that one," she said. "Ray had a chip in his tooth too, and he'd never let anyone fix it." Then she pressed my hand shut over the bead and went back to the dance floor, where the music had changed to something nobody could waltz to.