Skeleton cameo with roses in ornate frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A skeleton head in profile sits inside an ornate scrolled oval frame, with blonde wavy hair pinned up and decorated with pink roses. Roses with green leaves fill the base of the frame, and spider webs appear in the upper corners. The skull and bones are shaded in grey with fine linework, set against a solid black background, with the frame and roses in soft pastel pink, cream and green.

Neo-trad Botanical Skull Skeleton Cameo Rose Frame Hair Spider web Leaves Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came back from the gilder with its curls still tacky, and Ruth Anstey swore at it the way she swore at weather. Forty years she had cut cameos in the back room of the shop on Church Street, in shell and onyx and once, for a bishop's sister, in jet. Nobody had ever asked her for bones.

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The order had come in a clean hand on heavy paper: a profile, a lady, roses at the foot, and whatever the lady was underneath to be left to the carver's judgement. The money was good and the name was not. Ruth worked through three weeks of nights with the lamp pulled low while the sea knocked at the harbour wall below the window. She gave the skull a sharp jaw and a faint grin. She gave the hair a tumble of curls, pinned with roses she shaded the pale pink of dawn seen through fog.

When the piece was finished, a boy in a borrowed coat collected it. He did not look at the face. He looked at the spiders, which Ruth had tucked into the corners of the frame, tiny and exact, the way webs gather in a house nobody visits. 'Mistress says you've put the house in,' he said, and Ruth saw that she had.

She never learned who the lady was. But on the first wet night of winter a woman came into the shop shaking rain from a grey shawl, asked for a name to be cut inside a locket, and left a single pink rose pressed flat between two sheets of blotting paper on the counter, as if it were payment.