Neo-traditional style skull tattoo with a pink rose on the inner forearm, the skull shaded in grey and the rose in pink and green.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and pink rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded skull sits over a pink rose with green leaves on the forearm. The skull is rendered with soft grey shading and the rose with bold outlines and pink colour. The tattoo is centred on the forearm against a blurred background of a patterned surface and clothing.

Neo-trad Forearm Skull Rose Leaves

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

Sit closer, all of you, and mind the candle, for this is a tale of Ardenmoor, a kingdom that never stood on any map, and of the widow Maren Holl, who had no coin for a headstone.

Keep reading

Her husband Tobias dug the salt pits below the grey hills until the sea took back the lower galleries. When the roof came down on him, the miners brought up what they could, and the bone-setter brought up his skull, clean and pale as a lamp. Maren could not bear to bury it bare. So each morning she carried it up to the south ledge, set it on the flat stone, bound its brow with ivy, and planted beside it a briar cutting a travelling pedlar had sold her for a sheep's tooth.

The briar bloomed the summer the old queen died. Its roses were the pink of cheap ribbon and heavy as wet wool, and they wound through the hollows of the skull until the eyes were full of petals. The Reeve came up the hill with two men and a coil of rope and said the king had forbidden flowers on common graves. Maren sat down on the stone and said nothing. She only laid her hand over the empty sockets.

The Reeve, who had buried a wife of his own in the same fever, stood a long while in the wind. Then he cut the rope into lengths, tied the briar to the stone instead of tearing it free, and went down the hill without a word. Every spring after, the roses came back, and the people of Ardenmoor still say that a skull with a rose in its mouth cannot be frightened off, and that a widow's grief is the one thing in that kingdom which grew without permission.