Greyscale realistic drawing of a skull with a rose held in its teeth, with red watercolour splatters below, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Skull and rose with red splatter

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A realistic drawing of a human skull with a rose pressed against its lower teeth, shown in soft greys with deep black shadows in the eye sockets and nasal cavity. Fine tonal shading builds the bone texture and the layered petals of the rose. Loose red watercolour splatters and drips run across the lower half of the image on a textured off-white paper background.

Realism Skull Rose Teeth Splatter Watercolour

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Wren, the rose is still growing out of the old king's skull in the crypt at Halder's Cross, and the sexton has given up pulling it. The dig-men found him when they widened the vault in the spring, grinning through a tangle of dry thorns and white bone. Someone had wedged a red rose between his teeth so tightly that the stem had split the jaw and wound up through the eye sockets like ivy in a ruin. Nobody on the council will say who put it there.

Keep reading

The old woman who sells candles at the lych gate says the rose is a bargain that was never finished. The king swore on his deathbed to return the Sallow River to the mill-folk, and the rose opens a little more each time the water runs low. Last week the petals were the colour of pale ash. This morning they were dark enough to pass for wine, and a red bloom ran down the stones beneath, as though the crypt were weeping ink.

I went down last night with a lamp and the key the chancellor had given me, meaning to tell him the thing was rotting the mortar. The rose had split its bud wide. Water gathered on every petal and dropped onto the flagstones, each drop leaving a mark like a thumbprint. I knelt and listened, and heard only the Sallow moving sluggishly beyond the wall, slow as an old man's breath.

I think it was never asking for the river. It wanted the king buried with his debts still owing, and it has been patient about collecting. I have written to the chancellor to say the crypt is unsafe. I have not yet told him why I sealed the door from the outside with my own hands.