Two pen sketches of tattoo designs: a left panel with a skull, roses and geometric lines, and a right panel with a bull skull, moths and dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and rose designs in pen sketches

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two side-by-side pen drawings on lined paper show tattoo designs. The left sketch has a skull with two peony-style roses, leaves and overlapping geometric diamond outlines, while the right sketch shows a bull skull with three moths and a diamond outline above it. Both use fine black linework with dense dotwork stippling for shading and no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Skull Rose Peony Leaves Moth Bull skull Diamond Geometric shape Animal skull Sketch

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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

The skull surfaces from the silt at Hawkesbury lock, wrapped in sacking that once held seed potatoes, and Pell swears it was already in the hold when the barge left Oxford. You do not believe him, but you do not argue either. You are nineteen, the boat is his, and the horns poke through the hessian like handles on a wheelbarrow.

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Nobody wants it aboard. Pell's wife says old bone brings bad water, so you scrub it with vinegar and lay it on the stern deck where the lamp reaches. That first dusk three moths rise out of the reeds and settle on the bone, one above the other, as neat as if someone had placed them with tweezers. By the second night there are more on the horns, wings the colour of wet ash, and above the towpath a pale diamond of light hangs where the chart shows only open sky.

On the third morning the bank is thick with peonies nobody planted, heavy-headed and dew-dark, climbing the willows like they have somewhere to be. Pell cuts the engine and stands with his cap in both hands. You understand then that the moths have been counting something, and that the count is finished.

You carry the skull up to the lock cottage and set it on the step with the horns to the sun. When you come back down, the sacking lies folded on the deck, and there are three small holes in it where the moths walked out.