Pencil sketch of a cracked skull framed by roses, rose buds and leaves, drawn on spiral notebook paper as a tattoo design.

Cracked skull with roses pencil design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a human skull with a cracked crown and a central seam, surrounded by open roses, rose buds and leaves. The linework is sketchy with dense hatching and soft shading on the skull, petals and leaves, giving depth and contrast. The drawing is in greyscale on lined spiral notebook paper, with the design centred and filling most of the page.

Traditional Botanical Skull Rose Rose bud Leaves Crack

Find an artist for this

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 crack shows itself first as a thread of grey water no thicker than cotton, and you are already kneeling on the cabin boards with a rag in your fist before the floor has time to go dark. Your father always said a boat tells you where she's hurting if you're quiet enough to listen. She is loud this morning. Water ticks along the keel as the lock gates groan behind you, and the Dorothy leans a fraction to the left, the way she does when she is tired.

Keep reading

Down the middle of her hull runs the old seam, the one the yard welded back after the ice winter, and it has split along its line like a skull cracking along its stitching. Nobody else on the cut would look at it twice. You look at it for the length of the Staffordshire towpath, pitch pot balanced on the gunwale, the stick in your hand going soft in the heat. Nan's roses in their tin tubs on the roof have been waiting all week for someone to water them. You give them a glance and keep working.

By dusk your hands are black to the wrist and the seam is a dark bead of tar from bow to stern. Your mother comes down the bank with a lantern and says the water is still seeping, and you tell her you know, and you pull the last two roses from the tubs because their petals are already dropping and there is nothing else soft enough to pack the gap. You jam them in with the rag. They drink the canal and swell, pink going to bruise under the lamp, and the leak stops like a held breath.

In the morning the Dorothy sits level on the water and the roses are brown paper in the bilge. Your mother tips them into the cut one petal at a time and watches them sink without asking why you did it. Downstream the lock gates open, and the boat rides on, dry-bellied and smelling of pitch, with the water quiet under her.