Coloured drawing of a raven perched on a skull among red roses, with a bee and a blue butterfly, in a detailed botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven, skull and roses design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A detailed illustration of a dark purple raven standing on a grey shaded skull, surrounded by red roses with green leaves and stems. A bee, a blue butterfly and scattered fallen red petals sit around the composition, with grass at the base. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and grey, set against a mottled grey background with colour concentrated in the birds, flowers and butterfly.

Botanical Realism Raven Skull Rose Butterfly Bee Petal Grass Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find Mr Harker's rose bed still dying back behind the sports hall, the same bed where he made you all pick up petals on Friday afternoons. The reunion is in the hall, and someone has pinned a paper sign to the fire door that says WELCOME BACK, LEAVERS, with one drawing pin missing so the corner flaps every time the door opens.

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Inside, the trophy cabinet has been dusted and the chairs are stacked in threes. Dev Okonkwo, who once set fire to the bins by the chemistry lab, is selling raffle tickets for a hamper. You tell him you still have the dented biro he lent you in 1997, and he laughs too loudly, the way he always did when he was caught out. Nobody mentions Ellen's pencil case with the skull painted on the lid, though you all glance at the window ledge where the crow sat every lunchtime, watching the bins with one flat black eye.

Near the end of the night, a woman you do not recognise until she speaks crosses the room with a paper cup of squash. It is Ellen. There is grey in her plait and a bee-stung lip from the buffet. "He's still out there," she says, nodding at the glass. On the tarmac the crow stands on the concrete rim of the rose bed, pecking at a fallen petal as if it were a note it had waited all term to open.

You walk out with her. The crow lifts, unhurried, and the bee that has been bumping the window all evening follows it over the bins. Ellen tips her cup into the flowerbed. "Still red," she says. You stay a while longer than you meant to, long enough to watch the petals settle on the grass like something that has finished arguing.