Black and grey skull tattoo with peonies and leaves, shaded in dotwork, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and peony on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A human skull sits at the centre of the design, with its eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth rendered in stippled dotwork shading. Below it, a large peony and smaller blossoms are framed by leaves, with bold outlines separating the petals from the skull. The image shows a close, straight-on view of the forearm against a plain light background, with only black ink and grey tones.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Skull Peony Flower Leaves Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Kestrel House had been broken since Tuesday, so Maureen Okafor climbed the fourteen flights with a carrier bag in each hand and the peony cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper. Her knees had opinions about it. On the landing she stopped to get her breath, and the window there looked straight across at the car park and the grey roofs of the estate beyond.

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Joe Pryce was waiting at the door of flat 14C with a face like a wet Sunday. His mother's peonies had come up the year she died, two dark buds on a stick of a plant nobody had watered properly. He had kept them alive on the balcony with a kettle and a bucket. 'They're stubborn,' he said. 'Like her.' Maureen didn't ask which her he meant.

Inside, the flat smelled of burnt toast and turpentine. On the kitchen table lay a bird skull Joe had found in the bin store, scrubbed with bleach and a toothbrush, its beak gone soft at the tip. He wanted it for a drawing he was doing, something to pin above the cooker. Maureen set the cuttings in a jug of water and told him a skull only frightens people who think it's the end of something.

They worked until the light went orange over the car park. Joe sketched the bird skull with his tongue between his teeth, stippling the sockets until the paper looked like frost. Maureen cut the peony stems on the slant, the way her own mother had taught her, so they would drink. When she left, the jug stood on the sill, and the two fat buds had begun to open, pale as a gull's underside against the dark glass.