Realistic skull tattoo with a red rose above it and red ink splashes, on the upper back of a person.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and red rose on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A shaded human skull sits lower left, with a large red rose blooming above and to the right. Soft black and grey shading gives the skull volume, while loose red and black splashes spread across the skin around the design. Red ink dominates the rose and splashes against the greyscale skull, and the tattoo fills most of the frame on the upper back.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The rain has been coming sideways across the market since Tuesday, and I have sold four roses in three days, which Mr Okonedo next door says is a sin against the trade. The red ones went first, the way they always do when people are sorry about something. I kept the dark ones back for the funerals. You'd have laughed at me, lining them up in the bucket like a row of bruises.

Mum found Dad's old enamel tin under the stall boards this morning, the one with the skull he painted on the lid the winter you were born. It had gone soft at the corners and the black had run into the grey, so the bone looked like it was sinking into a puddle. Someone had dropped a rose on it, or she had, I can't tell which. The petals had stained the tin red and the stain had spread out in drips down the side, and she sat on an upturned crate looking at it for an hour while the rain came through the roof.

I told her to throw it out. She didn't. She wiped it with her sleeve and said he always did have an eye for things that were about to go, and then she asked me to bring the tin home and not to wrap it.

I've put it on the shelf above the kettle. The rose is still bleeding into the skull, and I'm starting to think that's the honest way to paint it. Come home at Easter if the boats let you. Bring the good kettle back.

Love, Nell

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