Black and grey sketch-style skull tattoo with a rose below it, running along a forearm.

Sketched skull and rose on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull with a cross mark on its forehead fills the upper part of a forearm, drawn in loose, sketchy linework with soft stippled shading. Thin branch-like lines spread across the skin around the skull, and a rose with open petals sits at the lower edge of the design. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a dark, glossy background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind up here has ears and repeats everything to the wrong people. Last March the guard at Carrow Bridge stamped a passport for a thin man with a sleeve of ink running from wrist to elbow. The ink was grey and sketched rather than solid, as if someone had drawn a skull in pencil and then let the rain have it. Across the forehead of that skull sat a cross, and from the bones crept branches, fine as frost on a window. Lower down, a rose had been drawn with its petals half open, as though it had been caught in the middle of deciding.

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The guard, Tomas Hebb, had a daughter who grew roses behind the customs hut in pots cut from old tins. He asked the man what the skull was for. The man said it was for the road he had already walked, and the rose for the one he had not. Hebb waved him through because the queue behind was long and the stamp was already in his hand.

That night Hebb found the stamp in his coat pocket and could not remember pressing it. In the morning his daughter's roses were stripped to the stems, every bloom laid on the step of the hut in a neat pile, petals turned toward the mountain. Nobody saw who did it. The dogs did not bark.

So if you cross the Sallow Pass and a thin man asks you the time, give him an honest answer, and do not ask where his rose went. He is still walking, and some of us are still waiting for the stamp to wear off.

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