Realistic tattoo design of a large skull framed by an ornate silver scrollwork border of roses, with sunflowers, butterflies and a lake landscape inside, shown as a flat design with no body placement.

Skull and roses in an ornate frame

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A large skull sits within an oval scrollwork frame decorated with grey roses, with smaller skulls at the top and bottom. Inside the frame, the skull's eye socket holds sunflowers and butterflies, and a lake with pine trees and distant mountains fills the background, with red roses along the lower edge. The shading is smooth and detailed in greyscale for the frame and skulls, with colour used for the roses, sunflowers and sky.

Realism Botanical Skull Rose Sunflower Butterfly Frame Lake Mountain Landscape Ladybird Scrollwork

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

Four o'clock and the flour was still hanging in the light over the bench when I finally took the old frame off its nail. Mrs Oyelaran had left it behind the proving cupboard the week she retired, an oval thing with scrolled edges gone dull from years of steam, and I had meant to throw it out. Behind the cracked glass a lake lay under pines, mountains standing pale at the back, and in the corners someone had painted butterflies so small you had to lean in to find them.

Keep reading

She had a rule about it. "Bread won't rise if you're not looking at something that's looking back," she said, tapping the grinning skull at the top of the scroll, and she never explained what she meant. I didn't believe a word. But I hung it on the wall facing the proving tins, and for three weeks I shaped my loaves with it at my shoulder, sunflower heads and red roses crowding the lower edge like a queue outside a shop that hasn't opened yet.

This morning I did something I'd never done. I carried the frame to the front window, propped it on the sill, and waited for the sky over the car park to go from black to the colour of weak tea. The loaves cooled on the rack behind me, ticking as they gave up their heat. When the light came, it came through the glass and laid itself over the painted water, and for a moment the lake looked real, the way a window does when you have stopped expecting anything from it.

I sold the first tray at six. Nobody asked about the frame. I left it on the sill, facing the street, because Mrs Oyelaran had been right about one thing: somebody should always be looking back.