Black and grey traditional tattoo of a rose and a skull with scale detail on a woman's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman rests her hand near her chin, showing a forearm tattoo of a shaded rose above a skull with scale-like detail. The linework is bold and the shading is mostly black and grey, with strong contrast in the darker areas. The forearm fills the right side of the frame against a dark top and a pale background.

Traditional Forearm Rose Skull Scale

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

The petrol gauge has been lying since the last town, so you keep the window down and listen for the engine ticking on the shoulder. The woman at the lay-by stall does not look up when you pull in. She is sorting dried roses into jam jars, their heads gone brown as tea, and she says the road ahead is closed past the salt flats, which is what everyone says when they want you to stay for supper.

Keep reading

She has a tin on the counter, the size of a loaf, painted over in fish-scale patterns that catch the sun like wet coins. "Take this to Halloway Spring," she says. "Leave it on the lip of the lake where the water was." You ask what is inside. She lifts the lid an inch: a skull, small as a child's, its eye sockets packed with dried petals. You close the lid quickly and feel foolish for flinching.

The road to Halloway runs straight for forty miles and then forgets which way it was going. Heat rises off the tarmac in sheets. Twice you pass cars nosed into the ditch, their doors hanging open like wings, and you do not stop. Somewhere past the cattle grid the radio gives up and you hear only the tin rattling against the passenger seat, a sound like someone knocking politely to be let out.

At the edge of the dry lake the ground cracks into plates, each one curled at the edges like old paint. You kneel and set the tin down where the mud turns pale. When you lift the lid again, the scales on the skull have begun to shine, and a single rose, red as a lip, has unfurled from the socket where the petals were. You stay there a long while, waiting for the water to come back. It does not come, but the rose stays open.