Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with white blossom flowers on an upper arm, shaded with dark smoky bands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and blossom on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic skull fills the centre of the design, with a large white five-petalled blossom above it and a smaller cluster of flowers below the jaw. The skull is rendered with soft grey shading and strong dark shadows in the eye sockets, while the flowers are highlighted in pale grey and white. Dark, feathered shading surrounds the motifs and frames the composition against the skin.

Realism Upper arm Skull Flower Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessa wouldn't let me touch the skull until I had the blossom right, which took the whole of a wet Tuesday in Hereford. She stood at my elbow with a tin of lamp black and a rag, saying the same thing each time I lifted the brush: you don't paint white on white, girl, you paint the shadow it throws.

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The fair had been on the same field since Easter and the rides were tired. The big wheel ticked round at night with half its bulbs dead, and the cold came up off the grass through our boots. Dessa had started the back panel of the trailer the summer her husband Lou died, and she wouldn't say why the flowers had to sit under the jaw until the cluster there was finished and the skull could breathe.

On the last night she climbed the steps with a flask and sat on the ladder while I worked the petals out, five to a bloom, one at a time. 'Cherry,' she said. 'Lou's mum called them the ones that come before the rest of it.' I asked what the rest of it was. She tipped the flask at the wheel, at the dark beyond it, at the black feathering I had layered round everything so the picture sat in the night like a hole cut in the world.

When I came down the field was empty, the lamps going out one row at a time, and Dessa had already gone to bed. In the morning the trailer was gone too, and the panel leaned against a caravan wheel with the white flowers catching the first light, the skull grinning underneath as if it had only been waiting for the rain to stop.