Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a cat skull with ferns, mushrooms, oak leaves and acorns on the thigh, shown in two photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skull with fern and oak on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat skull with large round eye sockets and pointed ears sits at the centre, surrounded by a fern frond, mushrooms, bracket fungi, oak leaves, acorns and a small five-petal flower. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft grey shading on the skull, leaves and fungi. The design is in black and grey, shown in two side-by-side photos of the thigh.

Neo-trad Thigh Skull Fern Mushroom Acorn Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab had been dead three winters when Tom Garrow dug her skull out from under the oak, because the vicar's wife wanted the bones for the church bazaar and Tom was owed a shilling. He scrubbed the skull clean in the beck with a wire brush, set it on the windowsill of his cottage, and forgot about it, which was his first mistake.

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The bracken came through the floorboards that spring. Fern fronds unrolled in the cupboard under the stairs, and mushrooms, pale as eggs, grew along the skirting. Mrs Garrow swept them out every morning and every morning they were back by teatime, bracket fungus fanning out from the wainscot in shelves, like steps for something small to climb. Nobody in Hollin Ferry connected it with the skull until the acorns began dropping from the rafters.

Tom went down the lane to Old Sal, who kept bees and did not hold with doctors. She listened without speaking, then walked back with him carrying a jar of honey and a saucer of milk. At the cottage she set the saucer under the skull, which still had its round eyes turned to the window, and told him that a cat's bones keep the way into the wood open for as long as they stay above ground.

Tom buried the skull that Sunday beneath the oak where he had found it, and the bracken drew back into the earth like a tide going out. He kept the acorns, though, every one of them, and when his wife asked him why, he said they were the rent owed for the house.