Small traditional-style tattoo of a skull with a red rose and dark leaves on the side of a finger.

Skull and rose on a finger

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A small skull sits beneath a red rose with dark green-black foliage, all on the side of a finger. Bold black outlines define the forms, with the skull shaded in grey and highlighted in pale tones, while the rose uses red with darker shading. The tattoo is centred in a close-up shot against a white, textured background.

Traditional Hand Skull Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the rain doesn't respect anybody, not even the fish. Pull that tarpaulin down over your head and listen. This is about Dorothy Quill, who ran the flower stall at the back of Tanner's Yard market, under the iron arch where the drains always ran black. Every morning she set out buckets of red roses, and every morning the old sexton from St Brannock's came by in his oilskin and bought just one, never two.

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Nobody asked what he did with them. Then one wet March he came without his coat, stood there dripping, and said he'd buried his brother that week and had nothing left to lay on the box but a single bloom. Dorothy wrapped it in brown paper the way she always did and told him roses are only the best of a short thing. He laughed at that, the first laugh anyone had heard from him in years.

The next Friday there was no sexton. Dorothy found a note tucked under the bucket, in copperplate, asking her to keep the stall open one more season. Folded inside it was a little drawing: a skull with a rose growing out of its crown, stems wound through the eye sockets, the lines inked so black they looked wet. She kept that drawing in her apron pocket until her hands went stiff.

Some say the sexton was never a sexton at all, only a man who knew that the dead want something bright to look at. Others say Dorothy kept the stall open for thirty years and never once sold a rose without wrapping it the same way, brown paper and a short word about what roses are for. Mind your step on the cobbles going out. The drains are still running black.