Black and grey realism tattoo of roses over the shoulder and a skull-faced woman on the back, shown from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and skull portrait across back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows realistic roses high on the shoulder blade and a woman's face with a skull-like or sugar skull mask set lower on the side of the back. The work uses smooth black and grey shading with fine detail in the petals and facial features. The image is taken from behind on a plain clinic background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Back Shoulder Rose Skull Woman Sugar skull Portrait Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hester, The snow shut the pass on Tuesday, so I am stuck at the Crowfoot Inn with nine other guests, a landlord who counts the coal, and a painted mask above the stairs that nobody will explain. It is a sugar skull, cream-white and cracked, with rosettes pressed into the cheeks. Beneath it the plaster has gone the colour of ash. I have spent three evenings trying to match that grey in my sketchbook and cannot.

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Mrs Ostrander, who keeps the kitchen, says the mask belonged to a woman who came up in the winter of 1891 to marry the miller's son. She carried a rose bush in a tin bucket and planted it under the east window. The bush is still there, black with frost, and every spring it throws out one bloom no bigger than a thumbnail. The miller's son never came down from the ridge, and she never went back down either. I do not think she meant it as a ghost story. I think she was telling me where the good light falls.

This morning I went out before the others were up and drew the bush against the moon, which lay on the snow like a dropped coin. The petals came out soft at the edges, pale where the light touched them and dark where they folded in on themselves. When I looked up, the mask was reflected in the window glass, and the face in the glass seemed to have drawn a little closer. I rubbed the graphite with my thumb until the rose and the face matched. Then a bell rang upstairs, and I heard someone laughing in the room with the wrong door.

Come up in April if the road opens. Bring my good charcoal and the blue paper. I have decided the mask needs a companion, and I have decided it will be you. Yours, Margit.