Black and grey drawing of two skulls merged into a heart shape, with a small flower and scroll ornament below, on a pale grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart-shaped skull with floral ornament

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two skulls arranged mirror-image to form a heart silhouette, with their eye sockets and teeth picked out in white against solid dark grey. Fine hatched and stippled linework builds the shading inside the skull shapes, and a symmetrical scroll and flower ornament sits beneath them. The design is set on a plain light grey background with no colour.

Skull Heart Flower Scroll Ornament

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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

The left lift stopped at the fourteenth floor again, so it was you who had to go down the shaft with the torch between your teeth and the cage hanging above you like a held breath.

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Ferncliffe House had been built in pairs. Two lifts, two shafts, set side by side so the buttons in the lobby mirrored each other, and Maureen Pask, who had kept the maintenance books for thirty years before her knees gave out, used to say the builders had meant them to be twins and then lost their nerve. She taught you to read the cable drums by ear, to tell a worn guide shoe from a sticky door by the sound it made, and she never once let you call a fault a ghost.

The fault was not in the machinery. Halfway down the far wall, where the torch found the old enamel, someone had painted two skulls facing each other, their jaws nearly meeting over a cluster of hatched bones, and beneath them a scroll and a small flower, all in a grey so dark it had gone almost black. Rust had lifted it in patches. Your light caught a loose flake on the guide rail, and every time the car rose, the flake caught the counterweight.

You scraped the flake clear, greased the rail, and wrote the report in the careful capitals Maureen insisted on. Under cause you wrote nothing about the wall. The next morning the left lift ran clean all day, and the tenants on fourteen went back to pressing their buttons without looking up at the lintel, where the two skulls still kept their silent watch over the shaft.