Black and grey line drawing of a skull framed by fern-like foliage and a beaded arc above, with the word Virgo and a short poem beneath, shown as a botanical tattoo design.

Skull and foliage Virgo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a skull wrapped in feathery fern or leaf sprigs, with a beaded arc above and a dotted detail at each side. Fine hatching and cross-hatching give the skull and foliage their shading, with light grey wash behind the figure. The word Virgo in serif capitals and a four-line poem sit centred below the illustration on a plain white background.

Botanical Skull Foliage Fern Leaves Arc Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the peat, and mind the cat, she has opinions about strangers. Now. On Hollin Isle, in the years before the ferry, there was a woman called Maren Coll who kept the bracken cutting for the crofts. Every autumn she went up past the standing stones with a sickle and a sack, and every autumn the fern stood taller than her head, feathered and green going to rust, and she came down with her arms full and her hair full of seed.

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The island folk said she had been dead once, three days in the February storm when she was nine, and that when the minister's wife wrapped her in linen for the box, the child sat up and asked for porridge. Nobody believed it, mind, but nobody would sit beside her in the kirk either. She didn't mind. She had her bracken and her sums, and she was exact about both. A sprig of fern laid across a sleeping man's chest, she'd say, and he'd wake with the cold gone out of his bones. Count the fronds on a single stalk and you'd know the day your boat would come home.

Then one October the sea came over the causeway and took the lower byre, and in the wreck they found a skull crowned with bracken, a thread of tin wire holding the fronds in place. Nobody had put it there. The minister said it was some old Sabbath dead come up out of the peat. Maren took it home, scrubbed the teeth with salt until they shone like good china, and set it in her window where the morning light reached first.

When she died, the crofters found the window full of ferns grown up through the sill, and the skull still sitting among them, its ribs gone to glass in the frost. The bracken still comes up through that sill every autumn, and nobody on Hollin has the heart to cut it.