Black and grey tattoos of roses and a skull on a woman's upper arm and forearm, with a dark band tattoo on the wrist, while she wears a black sleeveless dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and skull tattoos on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a black sleeveless fitted dress with a flared skirt stands against a plain grey background, with her face cropped out of the frame. Her right arm, raised with the hand resting on her hip, carries a sleeve of black and grey tattoos that include roses and a skull, with a dark banded design near the wrist. A smaller tattoo is visible on her other forearm, and the image is evenly lit with the subject centred.

Upper arm Forearm Rose Skull Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last caravan of Harrow's Travelling Wonders was left in a field outside Stow with one wheel jacked up on a tin of paint. Only Mother Anselm stayed with it. She had carried roses in clay pots from town to town for thirty winters, and they were the only things in the show that were never sold off. When the ringmaster asked why she bothered with flowers for a tent that drew no crowd, she said the roses had been promised to somebody, and she would not say who.

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Dunstan, the knife-thrower, kept a skull on the cart's back step, a gift from a surgeon in Leeds who had owed him a debt. Each evening before the show he polished its brow with a rag and told it the takings, and the skull never answered. The roses leaned toward it through the window all the same, the way a child leans toward a lamp.

When the ringmaster came for the brass fittings and the leather band Dunstan wore on his wrist for the act, Anselm refused him. She wound the band twice round the stem of the tallest rose, tied it off with the knot her mother had shown her, and set the skull in the pot beside it. The ringmaster laughed and walked off toward the Stow road with his pockets full of brass.

The following spring a farmer's boy found briars come up thick through the caravan's floorboards, and in the middle of them a rose the colour of old wine, with a leather band still knotted at its stem and a white skull at the root. He cut none of it. He only left a jug of water by the wheel, the way you would for a guest who had come a long way and meant to stay.