Black line drawing flash of a skeleton leaning on a 3D gravestone reading ACAB, with pink tears, a pink rose and a black coffin, shaded in pink and black.

Skeleton leaning on an ACAB gravestone with rose

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A black outline drawing of a skeleton with its hands resting on a three-dimensional gravestone inscribed with the letters ACAB. Three pink teardrops fall beside it, and a pink rose with a stem and leaves sits on the right next to a solid black coffin shape. The linework is bold and even, with pink used as flat fills and shadow on the stone steps and tears, set against a pale grey background.

Neo-trad Skeleton Tear Rose Coffin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone arrived in Hebden Scar on a Tuesday, wrapped in sacking, and nobody in the churchyard could agree on who had ordered it. Ray Tobin, who had kept the grass cut there for thirty-one years, decided it was the late Harold Pim's idea of a final word. Harold had spent his working life in the quarry office, arguing with men in hi-vis about overtime, and he had a way of saying the same three things whenever the subject came up.

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The mason had cut the letters deep and then, for reasons nobody asked about, given the skeleton leaning on the top a face that looked as if it had been crying for a week. Ray found it funny at first. Then the rain started, and he noticed the three pink teardrops had been painted by hand, one careful drop at a time, and the brushwork was a child's. Harold's granddaughter, Ellie, was eleven. She had been in the churchyard every Saturday since the funeral, sitting on the low wall with a pencil case full of paints she wasn't supposed to have.

On the third Saturday a single pink rose appeared at the foot of the stone, laid beside the black slab of the plot where Harold's wife would one day go. Ray didn't know who had put it there. He knew who would be furious if he moved it, and he knew who would be even angrier if he didn't ask.

He left it. The petals browned in the damp, the tears dried into the grain of the stone, and by the next spring the drops had crept a little further down the lettering, so that from the gate the A and the B seemed to be weeping too.