Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a girl with long braids and a dark collar, framed by thorny branches with a skull below, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl portrait with braids and skull on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey portrait of a girl with long braids and a dark high-collared top, set within a frame of thorny branches with a skull at the bottom. The face and shirt are rendered with smooth shading and fine detail, while the branches use bold, dark linework. The tattoo sits on the outer upper thigh and fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Thigh Portrait Girl Braid Collar Skull Branches Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bramleys were late that year, so my aunt sent me up the orchard with a basket and a warning about wasps. I was twelve and had decided that August that nothing in the world deserved my hands. The blackthorn along the far wall had grown into a hedge taller than the gate, its branches black and crooked and spiked like fingers that had been buried and changed their mind. I kept my braids tight and my collar buttoned to the throat, because my mother said a girl ought to look as though she had been expected.

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Under the blackthorn I found a skull. It was small, a rabbit or a lamb or something young, and the rain had polished it the colour of old piano keys. I sat down in the wet grass and looked at it for a long time. The wasps were busy in the windfalls, drunk on sugar that had split and gone soft, and a wood pigeon kept saying the same two words from the ash tree.

I thought about taking it to the house to frighten my cousins. Instead I dug with a trowel I had stolen from the potting shed, beneath the old Bramley where the roots lifted the turf, and I laid the skull in the hole with a windfall on either side of it, like bookends or guards. My aunt would call it morbid. My mother would say nothing and look pleased.

When I came back down the path with the basket empty, my aunt was at the kitchen door with flour to her elbows. She looked at my hands, black to the wrist, and then at the basket. 'Did you pick any?' she asked. 'No,' I said. 'I planted something.' She did not ask what. By October the old Bramley had given up every apple it owned, and I have never told anyone which tree I buried my witness under.