Black and grey skull tattoo with pink cherry blossom petals and red swirls on a person's upper arm, in a Japanese influenced style.

Skull and cherry blossom on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A skull sits at the centre of the design, with pink and white cherry blossom flowers and falling petals spread across the upper arm. The skull and background are rendered in soft grey shading with smooth gradients, while the blossoms, swirling red linework and small blue accents add colour. The composition wraps around the curve of the arm, with the skull set low and the blossoms framing it from above and to the left.

Japanese Upper arm Skull Cherry blossom Petal Swirl Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came aboard at Yokohama in a lacquered box no bigger than a loaf, and nobody on the Marigold would say whose it had been. Cook Agnes Dunmore set it on the shelf above the galley stove because that was the only warm place on the ship, and because she said a thing that had travelled so far deserved a ledge with a view. Within a week the men called it Captain and knocked on its brow for luck before going up the ratlines.

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Off the Horn the ship lost her foremast and three days of daylight. Ned Pardew, the youngest hand, went down with a fever that had him seeing white birds in the rigging. Agnes sat by his hammock and talked low about her village in Dorset, where the orchard in spring was so thick with blossom that the bees went drunk on it. On the third night she took a sprig of pink paper flower from the bottom of the box and tucked it into the skull's eye hole. Ned swore afterwards that the thing smiled at him, and that petals drifted off it onto his blanket like snow.

The Marigold made Falmouth in a bright cold week. Ned walked the quay on his own feet, and Agnes opened the box on the cobbles to show him the paper flower was gone. In its place lay one real petal, dried flat and still faintly pink, that could only have come from a tree a long way east. Agnes lifted it in her palm and carried the skull back to the galley, where it had always looked straight ahead, and now seemed to be looking at the open door and the sea beyond it.