Colour tattoo of a skull wrapped in pink and yellow flowers, leaves and a butterfly, in a botanical style on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A skull sits at the centre of the design, partly framed by pink and orange flowers, yellow leaves, dark branches and a monarch-style butterfly. The linework is dark and defined, with soft watercolour-like shading in the petals and skull bone. Pinks, oranges and yellows dominate the colour palette against a plain skin background, with the composition spreading diagonally across the upper back.

Botanical Back Skull Flower Butterfly Leaves Branches Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody had brought the name badges, so we wrote our own on the backs of raffle tickets, and I gave myself the wrong surname out of spite. Dean Pargeter found me by the squash urn anyway. He still had the laugh that used to get us both sent out of Biology, a noise like a car door shutting on a hiccup.

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We got talking about Maddy Clough, which I suppose was inevitable. In the art room she filled the margins of every exercise book with the same drawing: a skull with cosmos growing out of its eye sockets, a monarch butterfly she'd copied from a library book and then coloured in orange felt tip until it bled through the page. Mr Haskins made her tear one out in front of the class. She said dead things were only the frame for living colour, and he said that was a very nice thing to say to a fourteen-year-old who had failed her mocks.

Dean said she'd had a stall at the craft fair in Wakefield last spring, selling prints of exactly that, and that a man in a Barbour jacket had bought the lot without haggling. He said it as if the story were finished, and I suppose for him it was. I went to the far wall, where the old corkboard from the school foyer had been brought in and propped against the radiator for the buffet. Pinned at the corner, curling at the edges, was a single exercise book page. Someone had kept it, orange felt tip gone brown, the skull still grinning up out of the flowers.

I stood there until the squash urn clicked off, then took my raffle ticket, tore it in half, and wrote her name on the back of the piece with the wrong surname.