Colour realism tattoo of red roses, a shaded grey skull and green leaves across an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and skull on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm, showing three red roses with soft shading and highlights, a grey skull with wispy smoke-like swirls, and green leaves and scrollwork. The shading is smooth and blended, with fine detail in the petals and the skull's teeth. The composition wraps the skull in the centre of the roses, and the arm is cropped so no face is visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ringmaster's tent is down to its last three sections of canvas, and Uncle Ezra has sent you to the wagon with a tin of red and a rag. The roses on its side were painted by a woman who left the show at Skegness in 1952, and nobody has touched them since. Rain has run the petals into the grain. You scrape at the faded edge with a thumbnail and find a grey skull underneath, grinning out from behind the blooms as if it had been holding the brush.

Keep reading

Show nights are thinner now. Forty people on Saturday, twenty on Tuesday, and the lion went to a sanctuary in Wales with a look that stayed with everyone. Ezra keeps the books in a biscuit tin. The paraffin heater breathes grey smoke up under the canvas flap and it hangs in the lamplight in slow loops, the same wispy curls the painter gave the skull, and you watch it while he counts coins into stacks that never grow.

On the last night the band plays to nobody and you walk the ring alone with the tin. You mix the red with a little green from the leaf pots and paint one more rose on the bottom panel, petals heavy and slow, then you lay a skull in its heart and give it the smoke. The fine teeth take an hour. When Ezra comes out with his coat over his nightshirt he looks at it for a long time before he speaks.

"She'd have liked the smoke," he says, and hands you the smallest brush. "Keep the teeth fine. Nobody looks at the roses first."

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