Sketch-style skull with purple and blue poppies and anemone flowers tattooed across a person's upper back and shoulder.

Skull and poppies across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded skull sits centre-right on the back, with purple and blue poppies and anemone-style flowers curving over the shoulder and down towards the waist. The skull uses fine sketchy hatching and dark eye sockets, while the flowers have soft blue and lilac colour washes. Small dotwork stipples and a black ornamental motif sit above the skull and along the upper left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corrin had drawn the same skull forty times before the Duchess of Vell would accept one. "Too honest," she said, tapping the vellum with a gloved finger. "Give it a little shadow to hide in." So he hatched the cheekbones with fine pencil strokes, darkened the sockets until they held the lamplight like wells, and let the brow ridge soften into the ground of the page.

Keep reading

The poppies were easy. Vell's gardeners grew them in terraces above the salt flats, and every spring they opened their papery mouths for three days before the wind took the petals. The windflowers came up behind the walls where nobody had planted them, lilac and blue, and Corrin painted them with the rinse water from his brushes, a wash so thin the paper showed through like a bruise healing.

The Duchess paid him in silver and a room above the tannery. Eleven months later she sent for him again, and this time the skull was meant for her own stone, the one above the family vault. He stood in the cold yard with his sketchbook open and realised she had not asked for a memorial. She wanted the flowers to keep growing over the bone, the way they grew over the walls.

He drew it that way. Let the sun decide what the poppies meant.

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