Black and grey realism skull and lotus tattoo across a woman's back, with arms raised and sleeve tattoos on both arms.

Skull and lotus back tattoo with sleeves

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the back, with its eye sockets and teeth shaded in deep black and soft grey. Lotus flowers sit at the lower back beside the skull, and ornamental scrollwork and lettering cover the upper arms. The shading is smooth and tonal, with strong contrast, and the image is composed as a full-length rear view against a plain wall.

Realism Back Upper arm Forearm Skull Lotus Flower Scrollwork Lettering Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chisel had gone blunt again by the time the fog lifted off the harbour, and Edith Tregarthen sat on the bench in the yard with the stone between her knees, swearing in the Cornish her mother had taught her. Jory had left the skull half finished. Its eye sockets were cut deep enough to hold a thumb, and the teeth still had the rough grey look of quarry dust, but the jaw had never been freed from the block.

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The men at the Quay Inn said it was bad luck to carve a death's head for a man who was still breathing. Jory had laughed at them. He was making it for the Pengelly boy, nineteen, who had gone out on the Morwenna and never come back, and the mother had paid for a skull rather than a cross because she said the sea had already taken her son's face and she wanted something honest in its place. Nobody had told the mother that honest things were unlucky too.

Edith found the lotus herself. Behind the net loft the chapel drain ran into a pond of black water, and every July the lilies came up pale out of the silt, each one opening at the hour the bells rang for the noon tide. She drew them on the back of a chandler's bill and took the drawing to the yard. When she set the tracer to the base of the stone she cut the petals first, five of them, shallow and soft, fanning out beside the skull where the boy's ribs would have been.

On the morning the stone went up to the churchyard, the tide was high and the lane ran with seawater. Edith walked beside the cart with her hands in her apron. When the sun broke through the mist it caught the cut petals, and the water lying in each hollow flashed, so that for a moment the flowers seemed to be opening out of the bone.