Botanical tattoo of a skull formed from bare branches with small pastel flowers, on a person's shoulder and upper back.

Branch skull with flowers on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A skull outline is formed entirely from thin, twisting tree branches, with the eye sockets and nasal cavity open within the branch structure. Small blossoms in pink, purple and teal sit among the branches around the top and sides of the skull. The linework is dark and fairly fine, with the flowers softly shaded in colour, and the design fills most of the shoulder area against a pink top.

Botanical Shoulder Skull Branches Tree Flower Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry had been growing through the hearth of Carrow Keep since the spring after the roof came in, and by the year the estate went up for sale its branches had taken the whole east wall. Mrs Pryce hired me to keep the bailey clear of falling limbs. Nobody else would go up the ladders with a bow saw, so the work was mine, along with the cold tea in the flask and the pigeons that roosted in the arrow slits.

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From the courtyard the tree was never just a tree. The bare limbs crossed over one another until they made a skull, its eye holes black against the grey sky, its nose a knot of twigs over the old doorway, its jaw the broken tracery of a window. The village children called it the Vicar and walked the long way round. I did not mind it. Some mornings I climbed up just to sit inside the brow and watch the rooks come and go through the eye sockets.

In April the blossom came early, pink and violet, with a few flowers the colour of a bruise on the lower branches where the lichen had turned teal. Mrs Pryce came out in her wellingtons and stood under it with her hand on her hip. Take the whole thing down, she said. The buyers want a clean view of the sea. I told her the roots were under the chapel floor, and that cutting them would take the chapel with it. She did not believe me, but she did not argue either.

I took the saw up on a Tuesday and cut the brow first, the piece that made the forehead. The skull came apart in my hands like a drawing rubbed out, and by dusk there was only a tree again. I carried one bough down and left it on the flagstones by the hearth. In the morning the petals had fallen across the stone in a ring, and I stood there longer than I meant to, reading it like a letter.