Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a skull framed by purple peonies and green leaves on the upper arm of a woman in a white crop top.

Skull and purple peonies on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cream-coloured skull sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by three layered purple and blue peony blooms with yellow centres and green leaves. The linework is bold and dark, with flat, saturated colour filling the petals and soft shading on the skull. The tattoo fills the upper arm against a plain grey background, with the subject's long dark hair falling to the left.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Skull Peony Flower Leaves Bloom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Harker had been pulling bindweed from the rectory bed since six, and she was not going to stop because the vicar's wife wanted tea. The peonies along the south wall had come up purple overnight, the deep bruised violet of the ones her mother grew in Ossett, and she meant to cut the best before the rain flattened them.

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Among the roots, the spade had turned up something pale the week before. Not a stone. The sexton said it was a sheep's skull from the flood years, and she had let him believe it, because a sheep's skull was nothing to fuss over. The other thing she had found beside it was wrapped in oilcloth in a biscuit tin under her bed, and she had not yet decided what to do with that.

She knelt on a folded sack and worked the secateurs. Each stem came away with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Three blooms went into her basket, then a fourth, heavy as a fist, its petals frilled at the edges with yellow where the pollen had gathered. She thought of Tobias Greave, who had gone out in the November storm to ring the drowned bell and never came back up the lane. Nobody had asked her to keep a bone. Nobody had asked her to plant over it either, but the peonies had come anyway, and they came back every spring, blue-black at the heart and too stubborn to die.

At the gate she stopped and lifted the skull from the tin. She set one bloom into the cracked hollow where an eye had been, turned it to the light, and went up the lane to tea with the basket on her arm, leaving the rest of the garden to keep its own counsel.