Pencil-style drawing of a deer skull with antlers wrapped in purple and yellow flowers and green ivy, on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Deer skull with antlers and flowers

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A detailed drawing of a deer skull with long antlers, with flowers including purple lilies and yellow blooms growing across the antlers and skull. Small green leaves and trailing vines run along the antlers and down the sides of the skull. The shading is fine and grey-brown with soft cross-hatching, set on a plain cream background with the design centred.

Botanical Antler Skull Flower Lily Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the awning since six, and Marnie Pike had given up keeping the lilies dry. She dragged the deer skull out from under the trestle and set it on the wet board where the lamp could reach it, the antlers throwing long shadows across the buckets of wallflowers and ragged yellow poppies.

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Her uncle Joss had found the skull on the moor road in March, bleached to the colour of old piano keys, and had left it on her stall with a scrap of brown paper tucked into one eye socket. Make it pretty or make it go, the note said. She had not yet decided which was kinder. She wound ivy round the left tine, one leaf at a time, and pressed a purple lily into the bone above the snout where a face would have kept its brow.

A man in a waxed coat stopped at the edge of the awning and watched her work without buying anything. Water ran off the brim of his cap in a thin line. "That was my father's," he said eventually. "Shot it the autumn before the mill closed. Mum wouldn't have it in the house, so he hung it in the shed."

Marnie kept her hands still on the stems. "I'm sorry. I can take the flowers off if you'd rather."

He shook his head slowly and reached into his pocket for coins, counting them onto the wet wood as though paying for something older than the bloom. "Leave the yellow ones," he said. "She always liked poppies in the lane." When he had gone, the rain thinned to nothing and the light came in sideways under the awning. Every petal on the skull held a bead of water, small and round as a pearl, and she left them there for the sun to take.