Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a deer skull with antlers and red poppies with paint splatters on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull and poppies on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an animal skull with antlers, partly framed by two red poppy flowers. Soft, loose shading and splashes of red, teal, green and orange ink give a painted, bleeding look, with black drips and fine lines over the skull. Colour dominates the composition, which is centred on the thigh and fills most of the frame.

Thigh Skull Antler Poppy Flower Splatter Drip

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 skull came down off the top pasture in a sack of wet sacking, the way Tom Ackroyd carried things he didn't want to explain. Nobody in Scarrow Dale asked what it was. They asked whether he meant to sell it or keep it, and he said neither, he meant to paint it, and that set the chapel gossip going for a month.

Keep reading

He worked in the back of the old dye house with the door propped open for the light. He mixed madder root into a red so wet it ran, and he let it bleed into the antlers until the bone looked like it was sweating. Teal he took from a cracked tin that had belonged to his grandmother, the colour of a pond under ice. Where the poppies grew wild along the quarry wall, he cut a few stems and pressed their heads against the paper, and the petals left their own red behind. Every evening he flicked the brush and the splatters landed where they pleased, and he left them there.

A dealer from Keighley came in March with a cheque and a clean coat. He stood in front of the picture a long time and asked where the rest of the animal had gone. Tom said the rest of it had gone back to the hill, which was true. The dealer asked if the splashes could be wiped off, just the ones on the skull. Tom said no, and went on painting. When the man had gone, Tom lifted the last sheet to the window and watched a single drip of orange run down the paper and gather at the bottom edge, the way the first rain of the year gathers in a poppy's cup.