Black and grey skull tattoo with ornamental patterns and trailing vines on a man's shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate skull and vines on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey skull with a hollow eye socket and a decorative, mandala-like pattern on its upper head, surrounded by leafy vines that trail down the arm. The linework is bold and even, with solid black fills and fine grey shading on the bone and foliage. The skull is centred on the shoulder and the vines extend downward across the upper arm, with the rest of the frame showing skin and part of another tattoo.

Botanical Shoulder Skull Vine Leaves Ornament Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edric had been told to rake the vine walk before Vespers, not to argue with the bursar about the skull. But the skull had come up from the charnel pit with its crown still whole, a rosette of carved lines worn into the brow like the rose window in the chapter house, and the bursar wanted it scrubbed for the visiting bishop's table. Edric carried it out in both hands under a sack, because the frost had split the cloister flags and he did not trust his feet.

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He set it on the low wall beneath the old Gascon vine, where the leaves had gone the colour of rust. Rain had filled the empty eye socket and the water shivered when a breeze came off the fen. He thought of Thomas, the novice who had died in March, who used to cut his initials into the vine stems and swear the vines remembered every hand that pruned them. Edric had never liked the boy's jokes, and he did not like how the tendrils had crept along the wall toward the bone, as if they wanted it back.

He took the shears and cut the long shoot that ran over the jaw and down the stone. Sap bled clear onto the flags. Beneath the cut, though, was a second set of initials, cut deep and gone grey with age, and a date from before his own mother was born. The bursar would have his dinner skull. Edric tied the severed shoot back to the wall with a strip torn from his own habit, so that next spring's leaves would climb over the old name and keep it.