Black and grey pencil drawing of a Japanese-style skull with peony flowers and swirling wave motifs, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Skull and peonies in a Japanese design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a skull with a cracked, open jaw, framed by peony flowers at the lower left and right and curling wind or wave forms. The skull and flowers are rendered with soft grey shading and sharp dark highlights, while the swirling forms use fine, flowing linework. The design fills the whole sheet and is made in black and grey tones.

Japanese Skull Peony Flower Wave Swirl Wind

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

The wind comes up off the flats a little after four, the way it always does on the Sallow Pan road, and you are the only one at the fuel stop to watch the dust lift off the salt in a long grey sheet. Dolores, who has run the pumps since her husband died, calls it the Breath. She says it comes out of the split rock past the wash, the one shaped like an old man's face with its jaw hanging open, and that anyone who drives into its mouth gets carried wherever the wind has decided to take them. You have never believed her. You are four hundred miles from the nearest bank, and the only thing you own worth anything is the Ford with the cracked windscreen.

Keep reading

You leave anyway, because the sky to the west has gone the colour of pewter and Dolores has already locked the till. The wash is quiet at first, then the air thickens and bends, and the gorse along the verge begins to lean as though something heavy is walking through it. Pale petals come loose from nowhere and slap the glass, big soft things like the peonies your mother kept in a tin vase on the sill. One lands on the dashboard and stays there, impossibly fresh, its edges curled like the tips of waves. You pick it up. It smells of rain on hot stone, which is a smell you have not met in this country before.

When the wind drops you are parked beside the rock, the engine ticking, and the glovebox has fallen open. Inside is a pressed flower in a plastic sleeve, and a postcard from a town you have never visited, addressed to a name that is not yours. You read the message twice. It says only: keep the window down, the Breath likes to be asked. You wind the window down. Out past the wash the dust is settling back onto the salt, and the rock's open jaw looks, for the first time, less like a warning than a door someone has left ajar for you.