Neck and chest with a red-shaded skull surrounded by grey lilies on the chest, a grey butterfly on the neck, and a tattoo on the upper arm, in realism and botanical styles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red skull and lilies on chest and neck

Realism · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A woman's neck and chest carry a large chest piece built around a red skull with shaded highlights, framed by grey lily blooms and leaves. A grey butterfly with detailed wing shading sits on the neck, and part of another tattoo is visible on the upper arm at the left edge. The black and grey shading contrasts with the single red element, and the composition is centred on the chest with the skull at the focal point.

Realism Botanical Neck Chest Upper arm Skull Lily Flower Butterfly Chest piece

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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 lilies came aboard at Valparaíso in three crates, wrapped in wet newspaper, and the mate swore they would be black mush before we raised the Horn. Instead they bloomed in the galley tins through the whole of the southern run, pale as candle wax against the grey bulkhead. Nobody admitted to wanting them. We simply kept finding fresh water for them out of our own tots.

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It was Cale, the sailmaker, who first took the vermilion from the signal locker and painted the skull on the forecastle door. He claimed it was only soot and lamp oil at first, a sketch to show the boys what a proper death's head looked like. By morning it was red, bright as a distress flare, and nobody could tell him how it had changed. A grey butterfly had come out to us off the Cape Verdes and stayed, folding and unfolding on the rail, following the ship like a notion nobody had the heart to shoo.

The gale found us on the forty-ninth day, south of the Falklands, and for two nights the sea came green over the bow. Cale went below with a lamp and didn't come up. When I finally forced the hatch, the skull was still there on the door, wet and red, and the lilies had torn loose from their tins and lay in the bilge like pale flags of surrender. Cale was lashed to his sail bench, sewing with his teeth set, and he told me he had been keeping the thread dry.

We made Falmouth in April with eleven bulbs still green in their clay. The butterfly had gone somewhere in the gale. Cale and I walked them up to the churchyard above the harbour and pushed each one into the soil beneath a stone with no name, and the red on the door of the Persephone was the only colour left on that ship we didn't scrub off.