Black and grey pen drawing of a skeleton couple in a pinup dress and top hat, with banner scrolls of text above and below them, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Skeleton couple with banner scrolls

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of two skeletons: a woman with a ponytail and dress, and a man in a top hat and tailcoat offering her a small rose. Text is written across curling banners above and below the figures. The linework is fine and uses cross-hatching for shading, with no colour and plain white paper behind the design.

Skeleton Couple Top hat Rose Banner Scroll Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways off the Mersey by the time Ada Pell gave up on the last tram, and she was still wearing her good shoes, which was her first mistake. Ambrose Quill found her under the awning of the Palais with her hat in her hand, the way women stood when they had already decided not to cry in public.

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He had been dead since the Armistice, though he kept his top hat brushed and his collar starched, and he never once asked about her business. He offered her a rose he had snapped from the railings of St Anne's churchyard, its petals gone the colour of stewed tea. She laughed at him, and he counted that as the first decent thing to happen all year.

They walked the long way home past the gasworks, him talking about the stonemasons who carved angels for the cemetery and got the wings backwards, her telling him the Palais band had played the same waltz for six years running. At the corner of Dock Road she stopped and tried to give the rose back. He told her to keep it. Nobody else in this city would walk her home, he said, and somebody had to do the job.

The rain stopped somewhere near the bridge. She pinned the rose to her coat, and the next evening, when the tram was late again, she found him waiting under the same awning with his hat already lifted, as though the pavement had never been quite so wet.