Flash style drawing of a grenade whose body is a ribcage filled with yellow, purple and green flowers, set on a plain red background with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grenade with ribcage and flowers

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A grenade is drawn with its body formed by a ribcage, and the spaces between the ribs are filled with yellow and purple flowers and green leaves. The linework is clean and outlined, with stippled shading on the bones and flat colour on the flowers and metal parts. The design is centred on a solid red background with plenty of empty space around it.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribcage Bone Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Rowlands had her spade in the clay of the top allotment when the blade rang against something that was not stone. Her uncle Iwan came up the path with his pipe unlit, took one look at the green-grey shape in the spoil and told her to step back and keep her hands in her pockets. It was a grenade, its safety lever rusted to the body, but the body was not what she expected. Someone had wired a ribcage of old iron-coloured bones around it, and between the ribs, packed tight with soil, marigolds and a sprawl of purple something were still growing.

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The bomb squad came up from Cardiff in a van that blocked the chapel lane. Sergeant Pryce was a small, patient man who smelled of peppermint. He crouched in the allotment for an hour with a torch and a tin of tea he never opened. Gwen Rowlands, Nell's gran, had grown flowers on that plot for fifty years and swore she'd never planted anything in the bottom of the bank where the spoil had come from. Pryce only grunted and said the spring had gone years ago, the pin was pitted with rust, and whoever had filled the cage with earth had known exactly what they were doing.

They found the name scratched under the baseplate after the men had carried it away in a sandbag: T. Rowlands, 1944. Gwen went quiet and then said her brother Tom had been a sapper at Anzio and had written home that he'd buried one he couldn't bring himself to throw away. Nell kept the pin, which Pryce had let her have as a souvenir. The next spring she put a row of marigolds in the same bank, and when they came up orange in the rain she thought of the ribs holding the flowers up.