Pencil drawing of a rose whose petals form a human skull, with a leaf and thorned stem, shown as a tattoo design on plain white paper.

Skull and rose design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a rose blooming from the top of a human skull, with the petals wrapping around the cranium and the jaw opening below. A leaf and thorned stem extend downward, and curling tendrils sit at the sides. The image is black and grey, with hatched shading on the skull and petals and clean outlines on a plain white background.

Skull Rose Leaf Stem Thorn Tendril Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August, and the Kentish orchard was dropping its last Discovery apples into the long grass. My uncle Stan kept his grafting knife on the sill of the press house, the bone handle worn pale by three generations of thumbs, and he would not let me touch it until I had cut a bud without tearing the bark.

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"Bark wants to slide," he said, tapping a young rootstock with the knife's blunt end. "You open the T, ease the shield under, and bind it before the sap thinks better of it."

I ruined four before the fifth held. He grunted, which from Stan counted as a medal. Then he nodded at the window, where a yellowed skull sat between a jam jar of nails and a tin of Golden Syrup. A farmer had dug it out of the hedge bottom the winter the drains went in, and nobody had ever had the heart to throw it away. Every June a briar pushed up through the gap where its jaw had been, and every June Stan let it grow.

"Longer than the trees, that one," he said. "Don't you go cutting it back."

I didn't. In September the briar came into flower, and the blooms opened out of the skull's mouth, petals curling over the cheekbones as if the bone had been waiting all along to be asked. Stan looked at it for a long time, then went out to the orchard and left me to bind the buds on my own.