Traditional-style chest tattoo of a ram skull with curled horns, flanked by red roses and teal diamonds with leaves, on a woman's upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ram skull and red roses across a chest

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large chest tattoo centres on a ram skull with curled horns, shaded in grey and black with soft highlights. Two red roses sit on either side of the skull, with teal diamond shapes and dark leaves filling the space around the upper chest. The colour is bold against the grey shading, and the composition is symmetrical, framed by the shoulders at the top of the frame.

Traditional Chest Horn Rose Diamond Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram had been dead three winters before anyone thought to bury it, and by the time Ada Thwaite found it under the gate at Scarth Top, the skull had gone the colour of old piano keys. She carried it home in a feed sack. Her brother Tom said it was bad luck to bring a thing like that down the fell, and she told him bad luck was only weather that had made up its mind.

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She scrubbed it in the wash-house with lye and a stiff brush, then set it on the dresser between the Sunday cups, where the window light caught the curl of the horns. That week a wild rose came up in the crack beside the back step, though nobody had planted one there. By Thursday it had reached the sill. Tom pulled it out twice, and twice it was back, its stems grey and thick as fingers.

In September the jeweller in Kendal offered two guineas for their mother's brooch, the one with the teal glass stones that threw the lamplight about the room. Ada took the money and spent it on rose cuttings and a sack of bonemeal. She set the skull on a flat stone by the well and planted the cuttings in a ring around it, and she did not tell Tom what she was doing, because he had already said what he thought of it.

Come spring the ring was solid red, the petals heavy and dark as wine. Tom stood at the gate with his cap in both hands and did not come up the path. Ada sat on the step with the skull across her knees, its eye sockets full of blossom, and she let him look for as long as he liked.