Black ink line drawing of a skull built from poppies, orchids, carnations and small star flowers, shown as a design with no body placement.

Floral skull line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A skull outline is filled with botanical elements, including poppies, orchids, carnations and small star-shaped blossoms with leaves and stems. The work uses fine black linework with dense parallel hatching in the petals, and the flowers are packed closely so the skull shape reads clearly. It is drawn in black ink on white paper with no colour and a centred, full-page composition.

Botanical Fine line Skull Flower Poppy Orchid Carnation Leaves Blossom

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 lift had been dead since Tuesday, so I was hauling Nan's shopping up to the fourteenth floor when I found the drawing taped to the wall of the eleventh-floor landing. It was a skull in fine black ink on white paper, and every bone of it was made of flowers. Poppies had split open across the cheekbones, orchids crowded the eye sockets, and carnations ruffled along the jaw like frills on a Sunday collar. Tiny star blossoms ran between the teeth, their stems looping off the edge of the sheet.

Keep reading

Nobody on Hadley House owned a pen that fine. Mr Adeyemi from flat nine reckoned it was the lad who sat on the bins with his earphones in, but Dale only snorted and said he couldn't draw a straight line if you paid him. I asked around for a week. Every answer led up.

On the Saturday I found her on the roof, kneeling beside the council planter tubs where the poppies were going over and the orchids had somehow survived the frost. Mrs Vernon was ninety if she was a day, with a trowel in one hand and a pencil behind her ear. 'They're stripping these tubs in March,' she said, not looking up. 'Forms say they're a hazard. So I'm learning them by heart.' She unfolded a sheet from her coat pocket. Same hand, same ink. Every flower on that skull had grown in these tubs.

I pinned the drawing back on the landing with two drawing pins from our kitchen drawer, right where it had been. When I came back up the stairs later, the bags knocking my knees, the paper was curling in the draught from the open stairwell window, its petals lifting as if something underneath wanted out.