Black and grey skull and flower tattoo on the upper thigh, with fine script on the arm above it.

Skull and flowers on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a person lying on a bed, showing a black and grey tattoo of a skull surrounded by large flowers on the upper thigh. The skull is shaded with soft greys and fine detailed linework, and the petals are filled with muted tones. A small cursive script tattoo sits on the arm at the top right of the frame.

Thigh Skull Flower Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Penhale had carved bone for thirty years in the harbour town of Saltney Cove, and every spring the widows came to him with the same request. They brought a sailor's pocket watch, or a lock of hair, and asked for a skull to hold what they could not keep. He never asked what the flowers were for. Peonies for the ones who went out laughing, foxgloves for the ones who came back wrong.

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One March a woman came up the cliff path with no watch at all. She carried a pressed sprig of honesty in a handkerchief and a tin of drawing ink. Her husband, she said, had gone east on the Marigold and the sea had given back his boots but not him. She wanted the skull small enough to sit in the hollow of a hand, with the petals of a dozen flowers climbing out of its jaw, each one a day she had waited.

Tobias worked eleven weeks. He shaded the bone soft as dusk and cut every petal by lamplight until his eyes ran. On the last evening he set it on the sill, and a gull landed on the frame and looked at it for a long time before flying off.

The woman came back the next morning and did not take it. She asked him instead to carve a second one, for the Marigold's lost cabin boy, whose mother had asked her how to stop waiting. Tobias said he would. He kept the first skull on his own sill, and it was the only thing in the town that ever seemed to bloom in winter.