Black and grey rose with ornamental scrollwork on a person's side and ribs, and a pin-up face with a skull on the thigh, worn over a pink bikini.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey rose with scrollwork on ribs and thigh

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large shaded grey rose with fine ornamental scrollwork sits on the side of the torso, with a small floral scroll below it near the hip. On the thigh, a pin-up style female face is shaded alongside a skull. The photograph is taken at close range with soft natural light, and the subject's face is not shown.

Realism Botanical Ribs Thigh Rose Scrollwork Floral ornament Pin-up Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Quill had painted fairground lettering for thirty years before Mrs Ansell asked him for something he had never been asked for, a rose on her husband's coffin lid. She wanted it grey, she said, because Walter had hated colour and would not have wanted a fuss. Harold mixed lamp black with a little ochre and spent three evenings on the scrollwork alone, fine curls running from the lid's corner down the side like the ironwork on a gate.

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On the third night the lamp guttered and he found he could not stop. The rose came out heavier than he had planned, its petals folded over one another like the pages of a shut book. Below it, where the scroll gathered, he painted a small pin-up face, a woman with a curl over one eye and lips that had been the fashion when he was a boy. He had copied her from a calendar Walter kept in the back of the van. Then, because the face looked back at him too kindly, he shaded a skull into the cheekbone, so that only a careful eye would find death sitting behind her smile.

Mrs Ansell came on the Friday with her gloves on. She looked at the rose for a long time and said nothing. Then she touched the scrolls with one finger, found the curl of the painted face, and laughed, a short sound like a cough. "He would have liked that," she said. "He always said I was prettier than the calendar girls, and he was never wrong about one thing in his life."

Harold never told her about the skull. He kept the second coat of varnish thin, so the bones showed through when the light came low, and every evening after that he drove past the churchyard with the window down, waiting for the sun to lie across the lid and show her face and the hidden thing together.