Greyscale skull with red-tinted flowers and a lily tattooed across a woman's shoulder and upper arm, shown in a botanical style with soft shading.

Skull and flowers across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded human skull sits on the upper arm and shoulder, with cracks drawn across its brow. Clusters of pink and red five-petalled flowers spread over the top of the shoulder and down towards the elbow, alongside a larger lily-like bloom and fine red trailing lines on the arm. The shading is soft and blended, and the warm red tones contrast with the dark grey skull against a plain dark background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Skull Flower Plumeria Lily Crack

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody believes me when I say the skull came aboard in a crate of cuttings, so mind your feet on the hatch and listen. It was the spring we loaded at Papeete, the Marguerite Lowe, forty days out with forty crates of plumeria bound for a nursery in Bristol. Wrapped in wet sacking, each stem looked like a dead thing until you scratched the bark with a thumbnail and found green underneath. Old Hennessy the bosun swore the flowers made the hold smell like a wedding.

Keep reading

Then, off the Horn in a blow, a crate lashed to the port rail split its slats and out rolled a human skull, grey as candle wax, with a crack running across its brow like a river on a chart. Nobody knew whose it was. The cook wanted it over the side. The boy, Tomas, who was twelve and had no sense, wanted it kept. He wrapped it in his flannel shirt and tucked it under his bunk, and every night he set a plumeria bloom in one eye socket and told it about his mother in Valparaiso.

By the time we raised the Scilly light the stems were rooting in their pots, pink-throated and stubborn. The skull was the only thing that never dried out. Tomas swore it had gone warm in his hands. On the last night, with the cape lamps lit and the crew too tired to argue, he finally walked to the rail and let it go. Hennessy watched the grey shape turn once in the swell, then sink.

In the morning Tomas climbed up to the bowsprit and found one pink bloom caught in the rigging, still fresh, its petals pulled into a long red curl by the wind. He tucked it behind his ear and never mentioned the skull again.