Traditional style tattoo of a shaded grey skull framed by red roses and green leaves on the forearm, with another red rose near the wrist.

Skull and red roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded skull sits among bold red roses with green leaves, filling the upper and middle forearm. The roses use solid red fills with dark outlines and highlights, while the skull is shaded in black and grey. A smaller red rose sits lower on the arm, fading into a soft grey smudge against the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the old schoolhouse at Carrow the spring the chalk pit flooded. Nobody from the class of sixty-one expected much, but Mary Tallis carried in a tin bucket of red roses from her yard and set them along the trestle tables between the urns and the paper cups. She said a hall without flowers was a hall waiting for a funeral, and nobody argued, because she had buried two husbands and knew the difference.

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Dennis Hoy arrived late with a paper bag of pear drops for everyone and a skull in his coat pocket. He had dug it out of the ditch by the mill when they were children, and he had kept it all those years in a biscuit tin under his bed. He said he carried it to remind himself who he had been at nine, the boy who pushed Anne Greave into the nettles and laughed. The room went still. Mary took one rose from the bucket, pushed its stem into the skull's empty eye, and said that was how you kept a thing honest.

Dennis wept a little, then told the story properly, and by the time the urns were cold the whole class was passing the skull from hand to hand, each one saying what they had done and how sorry they were for it. Anne Greave did not come, but someone telephoned her from the car park.

The next morning the caretaker found the schoolhouse door open and every rose in the hall had turned to face the window. The skull sat on the sill with petals across its teeth, grinning at the chalk pit as if it had been waiting all along for the water to go down.

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