Black and grey fine line tattoo of a skull built from leaf veins, with a thin stem line above it, on the inner forearm against a pink background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaf-textured skull on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull is formed from fine, branching linework that resembles leaf veins, with a thin stem-like line rising from the top of the cranium. The eye sockets and nasal area are filled with denser shading, while the outer edges fade into lighter, sketchy strokes. The tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones on a forearm, centred against a plain pink backdrop.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Skull Leaf Vein Stem

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

The wasps have found the windfalls before you do, so you walk the rows of Bramley with a bucket in one hand and a stick in the other, knocking them off the long grass. Your grandmother's orchard runs down to the brook in four strips, and by the last week of August the whole place smells of cider and wet bark. Nobody has pruned the old trees since she went into the home. The branches have grown into one another like hands in a pocket.

Keep reading

On the third morning you find the leaf. It has come down whole, pale at the edges and gone to lace, every vein still standing where the green has rotted away from it. Held up to the sun it is a skull: two round hollows where the eyes would be, a dense dark knot in the middle where the nose sits, the crown fanned out in fine branching lines. A single stalk rises from the top like a pin holding it to the sky. You turn it over twice before you think to be frightened, and then you are only fascinated.

You carry it up to the farmhouse and set it on the kitchen table beside her reading glasses. Her cousin Ray comes in from the yard, looks at it for a long moment and says the Dunmore boys used to pick these off the old Cox tree and leave them on the sills of girls they wanted to scare. He laughs. You don't.

That evening you press it between the pages of the seed catalogue she kept by the sink. When you open the book next spring the skull has gone brown and brittle, the veins still perfect, and you find you are glad it kept its shape.