Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a rose, two pansies and an animal skull with leaves, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose, pansies and animal skull

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a rose, two pansies and a small animal skull with leaves arranged around it. The linework is fine and precise, and dotwork stippling gives the skull and rose petals their shading. The main piece is black and grey, with a partial red rose visible at the lower left edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Other Rose Pansy Flower Leaves Skull Animal skull

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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 ground is iron by six, and you are already late for the ewes. Your father's gloves are still stiff from the yard, and last night's hay has left a sweet dust in your collar. On the sill of the back kitchen, between the bread bin and a jar of wet pennies, the skull of the field mouse you found in the feed store sits on a folded tea towel where you left it, its long front teeth yellow as old candle wax.

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Mrs Hollis across the lane has grown pansies in the trough by her gate for forty years, purple and yellow faces turned up even in February, and the rose over her byre wall never quite gives up its last red. Every Sunday she sends you across with a loaf wrapped in muslin. This week she doesn't come to the gate. The pansies have been cut back to black stalks, and her kitchen light is on at noon.

You take the loaf over anyway. She is sitting by the range with the wireless switched off, and on the table lies a biscuit tin of pressed flowers beside a small brown box. She tells you to take the skull, that your father would have wanted a farm to keep something that bites. You don't ask what she means. You only see the rose pressed flat inside the lid, its colour gone to the grey of old photographs.

Walking home, the frost lifts off the field in a thin white smoke, and you carry the box against your coat. In the yard the ewes are bunched under the ash, breath going up in clouds. You set the second skull on the sill beside the first, two small heads facing the glass, and you leave the kitchen light burning until the window turns from black to grey.