Black and grey traditional chest tattoo of a skeletal woman cameo in a beaded frame, flanked by scrollwork, shown on a chest held open by two hands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton cameo with scrollwork on chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal figure with long wavy hair and a rose at her chest sits inside a beaded oval cameo frame at the centre of the chest. Ornate scrollwork with shaded leaves and curls extends to either side, framing the cameo and the collarbones. The piece uses smooth grey shading and bold black outlines on pale skin, with a black top visible below.

Traditional Chest Skeleton Cameo Woman Rose Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cameo came up out of the Thames mud in March, wrapped in a strip of oilcloth tied with fishing line, and Ezra Pell knew before he unwrapped it that it had been made to be looked at by the dead as much as the living. Inside the beaded oval a woman sat in profile with her hair piled in wild curls, and where her face should have been there was only a skull, grinning politely over a single rose she held at her breastbone. Ezra had sold enough mourning jewellery to know the style: the hand-cut leaves curling out either side like smoke, the silver pearls counted one by one by someone with time to spare.

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He took it to Mrs Oriel Quinn, who kept a bench above the fishmonger's on Tooley Street and had no patience for sentiment. She turned it under her lamp for a long while. 'Pawned, not stolen,' she said. 'Somebody's wife, I'd guess, or somebody's grief. The back's engraved with a date and a name that's been scraped away.' She pressed a thumbnail to the scrollwork. 'Whoever paid for this wanted her to keep looking pretty after she'd stopped.'

Ezra went looking for the date. The name had been Agnes Thorne, and the Southwark registry had her buried in 1871 in a churchyard that flooded every winter. He found the stone sunk half in mud, its lettering gone soft. A fresh rose was tucked into the grass at its foot, its stem wrapped in wire, and it had not yet wilted.

He did not know who had been leaving flowers for over fifty years, and he decided not to ask. He knelt, laid the cameo face up on the stone where the rain could reach it, and set the frame square against the lettering. By morning the river would have it back, or the next pawnbroker, or nobody at all. Ezra walked home with his hands empty and the cold in his knuckles, and for the first time in a decade he slept through the night.