Traditional style tattoo of red roses and a horned animal skull with grey shading on the front of a thigh, with grey stockings and white bedding behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red roses and horned skull on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a central animal skull with curved horns or antler-like shapes, framed by two large red roses and smaller pink roses. The linework is bold and the skull is shaded in grey and black, with the roses in red and pink for contrast. The photo is taken from above and looks down the leg, with the tattoo filling the lower half of the frame against white bedding.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hild,

Keep reading

The abbot has finally let the old well be cleared, and the men brought up more than rope and rubble. Brother Osric found a ram's skull down there, wedged between two stones, its horns still curled like the handles of a plough. He wanted to throw it on the midden, but I asked him to leave it on the sill of the scriptorium window, where the light comes through at noon and the glass is slightly green.

Then the roses. Sister Agnes, who tends the cloister garden as if it owed her money, has trained the red climber up the north wall this spring, and it bloomed all at once the week after the skull came out of the ground. Two great crimson heads, and smaller pink ones scattered around them like the ends of a sentence. Brother Cuthbert, who cannot abide superstition, says it is nothing but the damp and a good year for manure. He still stops to look at it on his way to Vespers.

I have been copying the Psalter for the new chapel and keep drawing the skull in the margins without meaning to, a little ink-black cage of bone with the roses curling round it. Father Anselm saw one and frowned, then asked me to do the same on the initial letter of the Magnificat. I told him the ram had been dead a long time and had nothing left to fear. He laughed, which I have not heard him do since Lent.

Write soon. Tell me whether the bees swarmed at your place as they did here, and whether your husband has forgiven you for the cheese.

Your brother in Christ, Edmer

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