Two clasped hands showing a traditional-style skull and crossbones tattoo on one wrist and a pink rose with a teal bow on the back of the other hand, with a black patterned tattoo on the forearm

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and rose tattoos on clasped hands

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, showing a skull and crossbones on the wrist and a rose with a teal bow on the back of the hand. The skull uses bold dark outlines with brown and tan shading, while the rose has soft pink petals with darker pink shading and a teal bow with white highlights. A black swirling pattern with small hearts is visible on the forearm at the top right, set against a plain grey background.

Traditional Neo-trad Hand Forearm Skull Crossbones Rose Bow Heart Swirl Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the rope, it's older than your mother and it'll take your fingers if you let it. Sit where the tarpaulin's dry. Now, you want the one about Nell Corrigan and the rose, not the one about the drowned curate. That one's for winter.

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Nell worked the lock at Hythe Bridge with her father's hands, which were all knuckle by then. Every boat that came up the cut had to pass her ledger, and every bargee paid the toll in something: coin, eels, or a song if he had no coin. Tobias Fenn paid in ink. He carried a pot of it and a needle of bone, and he'd sit on the beam with the gate weeping water beneath his boots, marking the men who came through. A skull and crossbones on the wrist for the ones the river would have. A rose on the back of the hand for the ones who'd come home. Nell said she didn't believe a word of his nonsense, but she let him do her a ribbon of teal across the knuckles all the same, and she never once wiped it off.

Winter came hard that year. The cut froze at the edges and the Pale Heron went under the gate in a black flood with Tobias still on her deck. Nell went down the slimed steps with the boathook and a coil of tarred rope, and she found him clinging to the gate chain with the water up to his chin. She got the rope round his wrist, the one with the skull on it, and she hauled until her father's old shoulders cracked in her own. Neither of them said much after. He just held her hand on the beam while the ice ticked and cracked around them, and his thumb moved over the rose, over and over, as if he were checking the ink had held.

Some nights, when the water runs high under Hythe Bridge, you can still see the skull on the lock-keeper's wrist wink in the lamplight, and the teal bow beside it. Hand over hand, see. That's all the river ever asks of anyone.