Realistic colour tattoo of a grey skull framed by red roses on an upper arm, with dark shading beneath the flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and red roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A grey and black skull sits at the centre of the design, with two large red roses rising above and behind it. The skull is shaded with smooth tonal gradients and sharp highlights, while the petals use deep reds and lighter pinks. Dark shadowing runs beneath the roses and drips downward, and the tattoo fills the frame against a blurred dark background.

Realism Upper arm Skull Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shut that shutter, Tom, or the snow will sit on the bread. Aye, I can see you're listening. Good. Pull your stool where the heat reaches your boots, because this is the tale of the Ashcombe inn and the man who paid in roses.

Keep reading

Agnes Fellowes kept the inn with her husband Edwin, who planted two rose bushes against the south wall, red as a cut lip. Every January the pass closed behind the carriers, and one traveller still came up the road alone. He was tall, in a grey coat gone white at the seams, with a face like a knucklebone polished by weather. He never gave his name. He paid in coins that smelled of the river, and he always asked for the room under the eaves.

Edwin died in the first hard frost of the year the bushes bloomed best. When the grey man came up the road that January, Agnes had cut the last two roses and set them in a stone jug on the table. He stood in the doorway and looked at them a long while. Then he said he had never been offered anything that would not wilt. She told him that was exactly why she offered them. He left the roses where they stood and went up the stairs without a word, and the candle beside the jug ran black wax down its side like spilled ink.

Agnes went up at dawn. The bed under the eaves was made tight, the coins were gone, and on the windowsill lay two roses, fresh as the hour they were cut, their petals dark as wet brick. Outside, the snow had not a single footprint in it. Edwin's bushes flowered twice that spring, and the second flowering was the colour of the sky just before dark.