Realism style skull tattoo on the thigh with a red rose at the top left, green leaves and thorny stems, and small roses in the eye sockets.

Skull and rose on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A greyscale skull with soft shaded bone and dark outlines fills most of the design, with small grey roses in the eye sockets. A red rose with dark outlines sits at the top left, and green leaves and thorny stems wrap around the skull's sides and base. Colour is limited to the red rose, green leaves and a little red at the edges, with the skull in black and grey tones.

Realism Botanical Thigh Skull Rose Leaves Stem Thorn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The village hall still smelled of floor polish and the tea urn, the same as it did in 1996, when Mrs Haverly lined us up for the leavers' photograph. Nobody had told the caterers that most of us had gone to the Crown afterwards and never really come back. I found Carol Pryce beside the raffle table, holding a paper plate of sausage rolls the way some people hold a hymn book. She looked at me for a long moment and said, 'You still owe me a rose, Tom Ashby.'

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I had forgotten, or told myself I had. The biology lab kept a plastic skeleton called Gerald, with a cracked brow and a grin Mr Dunn swore was original. The night before the mocks, Carol and I climbed the wall behind the bins, took two red roses from the caretaker's bush and pressed one into each of Gerald's sockets. I took the blame when the head sent for me. Carol never said thanks. She just kept a straight face through assembly.

She reached into her handbag and produced a sandwich bag holding a single red petal, pressed flat and brown at the edges. 'Dad kept that bush going after the caretaker died,' she said. 'There are cuttings everywhere now. I've got one in a yoghurt pot on my windowsill, if you want a bit of the grudge.'

I carried the cutting home on the coach, wrapped in a paper napkin from the Crown. It sat on my sill all winter looking like nothing. In April a green leaf came out, then a thorn, then a bud the colour of a bruise. I never wrote to tell her. I did not need to.