Realism style tattoo of a shaded grey skull with red roses, leaves and grey scrollwork across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and red roses on an upper arm and shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large skull sits at the centre of the design, with grey shading that gives it volume and soft highlights. Realistic red roses wrap around the skull's lower left and right, with green-grey leaves and grey filigree scrollwork filling the upper area. The colour is concentrated in the red roses against the mostly grey and black skull and ornament, and the design follows the curve of the shoulder and upper arm.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Skull Rose Leaves Scrollwork Filigree Ornament

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win, the frost came in on Tuesday and took the last of the Crimson Glories off the back wall, so you can stop asking me about them. I've spent the week with my hands in a bucket of wet sawdust instead, scrubbing the brass plate that Mr Aske left in the parlour when he went to Leeds. It says Aske & Sons, Monumental Masons, and under that somebody has scratched a little skull with a rose tucked behind its jaw. I'd never noticed it before. Perhaps you only see things like that when someone has finally asked you to clean them.

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Mr Aske's boy came round on Thursday with the van to collect the stock. He stood in the doorway holding his cap and said his father had drawn the design himself in 1931, for a headstone that never got ordered, and that the family had kept the drawing in the tea caddy ever since. He wanted to know if I'd seen it. I said I hadn't, and he looked disappointed in the way young men do when a thing has been sitting in their own house without them knowing. Then he said the scrollwork was copied from the ironwork on the Corporation gates, the ones they took down for scrap in the war and never put back.

I went through the caddy after he'd gone. Under the tea tins there was a folded sheet of blue paper, the skull drawn in pencil with the shading worked in using the side of the lead, and a row of rose heads down the margin, each one coloured with a different red crayon, as if he'd been trying to decide. Nothing was written on it. I've pinned it above the sink where the light is good.

Come up at Easter if the trains run. I'll show you the drawing and you can tell me which red he should have picked.

Yours, Edie