Four angled views of a full arm sleeve in black and grey realism with red roses, skulls, a clock and women's faces, covering the upper arm and forearm.

Black and grey realism sleeve with skulls and roses

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows women's faces, skulls, a clock face, an eye, bare branches and a small script name near the lower skulls. The work uses smooth greyscale shading with strong contrast on the faces and skulls, and three red roses provide the only colour. Four photographs of the same arm from different angles fill the frame against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Skull Rose Woman Clock Eye Branch Script Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The roses came back red this year in spite of the frost, which I take as the frost being sulky rather than the roses being brave. I have had the clock off the potting shed wall since Tuesday. It is the one Father hung up so we would know when to stop watering, and it has lost both its hands somewhere between the compost heap and the gate. Mrs Achterberg from the next allotment says a clock without hands is bad luck. I told her bad luck is only the weather with a grander name.

Down by the wall the old elm has finally given up. Every branch is bare now, drawn out black against the sky like a crack running through glaze. Beneath it, where the drains went in, Tom turned up three skulls in the clay, grey as river stones and perfectly whole, and he insisted on giving them a proper place. He laid them in a row on the bench under the kitchen window, and he says they keep better company than the gnomes ever did. I haven't argued with him. There is a woman's face pressed into the mud beside them, or what looks like one, and I have not decided whether to tell the council.

Yesterday I went through Father's seed tins and found a folded map of this garden in pencil, every bed numbered, with a small cross beside the elm. Under the cross he had written only the word wait. I think he meant the roses. Three of them came up in the wrong bed, the red ones he swore would never take, and they have climbed the wall as if they had been practising.

So I have set the last cutting against the brick where the shadow falls at noon, and I have hung the clock above it with its empty face turned to the sun. You will say that is sentimental. It is. Come and see before the frost decides otherwise.

Your loving sister, June