Flash sheet showing a colour floral skull with butterflies and ribbon, a black and grey skull with a spiked crown, and JANE lettering beside a deer silhouette.

Floral skull, misfit skull and deer flash sheet

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows three separate designs on a white background. A tall vertical piece on the left combines a yellow skull with pink hibiscus-style flowers, green leaves, thorny vines, roots, pink ribbons and blue butterflies. At top right, a black and grey skull with a spiked crown sits above a banner reading Misfit skull, and at lower right the word JANE in grey sans-serif lettering sits beside a grey deer silhouette.

Botanical Neo-trad Lettering Skull Flower Butterfly Ribbon Thorn Root Leaves Vine Banner Lettering Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the spring after the frost took the orchards of Hollin Vale, old Maud Tarrow went up to the kingdom's wall with a spade and a length of red silk, because her son had told her the king's skull was rolling in the ditch again.

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The king had been a hard man who taxed the bees and hanged the millers. When he died the lords buried him under the chapel floor with a gold crown on his brow, but a magpie stole the crown, and the skull worked loose through a crack when the bells rang. No one would touch it for fear of his ghost. Maud was not afraid. She wrapped the bone in the silk, carried it down to the hedge at the bottom of her garden, and set it in the black earth where the brambles grew thickest.

Through the summer a strange thing came up out of that ground. Roots went down through the eye sockets and drank, the tellers say, from the old man's sorrow, and vines climbed out of the jaw bearing roses the colour of a cut lip. Blue butterflies arrived from nowhere and settled on the thorns. A grey hind stood at the gate each evening and would not take apples from anyone's hand. The lords sent a bailiff with a cart and a rope to fetch the skull back to the chapel.

He found the hedge so thick with blossom that he could not reach the bone without tearing his hands, and when the thorns drew blood he ran home shouting that the land had a king of its own now. Maud still lives there, the story goes, and every spring she ties a fresh ribbon to the tallest stem. Nobody in Hollin Vale has paid a tax since, and the hind, which the children call Jane, still waits at the gate for the apples.