Colour tattoo of a realistic skull, a red rose with dripping red lines and green leaves, with blue watercolour splashes, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Skull and rose on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A realistic human skull with ornamental scrollwork is paired with a red rose and two green leaves. Shading is smooth and detailed, with fine black linework on the scrolls and soft watercolour-style washes of blue and peach behind the motifs. Red drips run down from the rose, and the bright, saturated colour dominates the composition on the upper back.

Realism Neo-trad Back Skull Rose Leaves Scrollwork Watercolour Splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's glass where the snowmelt freezes, and sit where I can see your faces. Right. Now. Hollin Pass, the winter the tarn froze to its bottom, and a carter called Abel Mirk came up out of the west with a mule, a cart of salt, and a skull wrapped in oilcloth on the seat beside him.

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He'd bought the skull off a bone-setter in Kendal for three shillings, because the man swore it had been a saint's, and Abel was a practical sort who thought saints ought to pay their own way. All the way up the switchbacks he talked to it. He told it about his wife's cough, the price of salt, and a dog he'd kicked once and regretted. The mule didn't care for the conversation. Neither did the wind.

At the summit hut, where the cairn stands, a woman waited in the doorway with a kettle in one hand and a red rose in the other, cut from the last bush in her garden, which had no business blooming in snow. Her husband had died owing Abel for a year of salt, she said, and she meant to settle it with what she had. She lifted the skull off the seat without asking, set it on the sill, and pressed the rose into the empty eye. When the sun cleared the Fell, the whole thing caught fire pink against the blue of the sky.

Abel took his salt money and went down the far side without looking back. The rose wilted by noon, and the stem bled onto the wall where it had leaned, drop after drop, all the way to the flagstones. Some say the red stains on that hut wall are the rose's, and some say they're the carter's. The hut keeps both.