Traditional style tattoo of a grim reaper holding a scythe under a wreath of orange and pink flowers, with other tattoos visible around it on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grim reaper with scythe and flower wreath

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grim reaper in a dark hooded robe holds a scythe, with a wreath of orange and red flowers and green leaves across the top. The bold black outlines are filled with solid colour, including red, orange, yellow and teal, with simple flat shading. Parts of other tattoos, including a wing, a sun and a tiger-style head, appear around the edges of the frame.

Traditional Other Grim reaper Scythe Skull Hood Flower Wreath Leaves Wing Sun Tiger

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

Dear Walter,

Keep reading

You will think I have finally lost my wits, but Room Four is taken again, and the gentleman in it has paid through to Christmas in farthings wrapped in a handkerchief. He came up from the front on Tuesday with the rain behind him, a long dark coat, a hood he never lifts, and a scythe he carries over one shoulder the way the fishermen carry oars. I asked him to leave it in the boot room. He said it was not the sort of thing that could be left anywhere for long.

Mrs Dunning next door says he is a hangman's man come to settle an old debt. I say he is a lodger who eats his supper standing up and asks for orange marigolds in the dish every morning. I cut them from the bed under the wall because the frost took everything else. He weaves them into a wreath with the green stalks still on, and by the end of the week the room smells like the churchyard in August.

Last night the tide came so far up the Promenade that the lamps went out one by one. I went up with a candle and found him kneeling by the window with the wreath in his lap and the blade propped against the wardrobe. He said he had been sent to collect a child from the end of the pier. I told him there were no children on the pier, only Mr Hollis selling whelks, and he laughed, very low, like a gate on a rusted hinge. Then he set the wreath on my own hair, as though I were the one who would need it.

I have not told the doctor. I have hung the wreath on the back hook by the kettle, and I am sleeping with the door unlatched. Come home at Easter, Walter, and bring the good scissors.

Yours, Edie