Pencil drawing of a deer skull with antlers wrapped in wildflowers, ferns and leaves, pegged to a line against a dark background.

Deer skull with antlers and flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a deer skull with antlers, with flowers, leaves and fern fronds growing along the antlers and around the skull. The linework is fine and precise, with shading that gives the bone and petals depth. The design is rendered in black and grey on pale paper, centred in the frame and hung from a line with wooden pegs.

Botanical Realism Antler Flower Fern Leaves Skull Wildflower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody else had bid on the skull, so Ruth Okonedo paid eleven pounds for it at the back of a Tuesday sale in Sheffield and carried it home on the number 52 bus, cradled in a carrier bag like a loaf. The auctioneer had called it a red deer, a young stag, its antlers still in velvet when it was shot. Ruth thought the antlers looked as though they had been dipped in ink and left to dry.

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She cleaned it at the kitchen table with a soft brush and a bowl of warm water, then set it on the windowsill of her third-floor flat in Kelham Island, where the streetlight came in orange and the trams hummed up the hill below. For three nights she drew it. Her pencil moved slowly over the pitted brow and the lacework of the nasal bones, and when she reached the antlers she found herself adding things she had not put there: sweet peas, the thin curling tendrils her gran grew on the allotment fence, a frond of fern unfurling where the beam met the burr.

On the fourth night she stopped drawing and went to bed. In the morning the cracked tub on the fire escape, which had held nothing but grit since the landlord's man left, had split open with green. Sweet peas climbed the railing in a tangle of pale mauve, and a single fern stood in the corner like a question. Ruth stood at the window with her coffee going cold and looked from the plants to the drawing and back again. The skull on the sill had not moved, but the shadow it threw across the glass had grown a crown of petals, and the sweet peas, she noticed, were all turned toward it.