Four black and grey traditional-style tattoos across the fingers of a hand, including a rose and a skull with dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and skull finger tattoos

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Four small tattoos sit across the fingers of an open hand. The middle two are the clearest: a rose with bold outlines and solid shading, and a skull with stippled dots around its edge. The index finger and little finger designs are harder to read but appear to be outlined shapes with light shading, all in black ink and grey tones.

Traditional Dotwork Hand Rose Skull Dot

Find an artist for this

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

My mother pinched the buds off the rose every August before they could open. She did it with her thumbnail, quick and without looking, the way other women checked a hem. Dad called it cruelty. She called it pruning, and that was the end of the conversation in our house for thirty years.

Keep reading

The spring I finally took the fork to the bed behind the shed, I turned up a skull no bigger than a walnut. Its jaw was gone and the eye holes were packed with clay, and around its brow ran a ring of grit, as if someone had stippled it with a needle. I set it on the windowsill beside the seed trays and forgot about it until Mum came in for her tea and stopped dead in the doorway.

She sat down slowly. Dad had buried a biscuit tin under that rose the summer before I was born, she said, full of letters she had written him while his ship was in the Gulf, letters he had never answered. She had planted the rose over the spot so nobody would dig. The skull, she thought, was the marker he had made from a bird's skull and a bit of lead, a joke between them that she had never found funny.

That August I left the buds alone. I watched the first bloom open on the south wall, heavy and dark red, its outer petals going papery at the edges, and I did not tell her the skull was back on the sill, grinning at the rose through the glass.