Black and grey realistic skull with roses inside overlapping geometric triangles on a forearm, with the word Believe on the wrist, shown beside its flash design.

Skull and roses in triangles on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A healed forearm tattoo shows a shaded skull with three roses, set within overlapping black and grey triangles, with a scroll bearing lettering below the skull. The left photo is paired with a flat drawing of the same design on a light background, where stippled shading builds the skull and petals. The palette is entirely black and grey, and a small script word sits on the inner wrist.

Geometric Realism Dotwork Forearm Skull Rose Triangle Scroll Lettering Believe

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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

Shift your stools closer, and mind the lamp, for the oil is thin tonight and I will not tell this in the dark. Hear of Marcus Tullio, a mason of Ostia who cut grave stones for the harbour families. He carved the same device on every one he could sell: three triangles stacked point to point, black as a ship's hull, and beneath them a skull crowned with roses, its eye sockets shaded deep so the dead seemed to look out from a doorway.

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One winter a widow came down from the hills with her son's name in her mouth and a coin knotted in her sleeve. She wanted the skull, she wanted roses at the temples, and she wanted a ribbon of words beneath the jaw. Marcus cut the first line himself: Hero huius fabulae sum. I am the tale of this hero. She nodded. Then he cut the second and third, and when she read them aloud her face went as pale as the marble. It is not needful to save me, the last line said, and she heard it as an insult to the dead boy. She threw the coin in the dust and walked back up the hill without it.

Marcus kept the stone in his yard, unsold, and forgot about it through the summer. When the first rains came he found tiny white roses pushing up through the crack where the scroll met the lowest triangle, seeded from nothing he had planted. He never cut that device again. He sat with the stone at dusk, and the widow came down twice more, each time standing a little longer before she turned for home.

The last time she came she carried a lamp of her own and set it on the step beside his. Then she went up the hill, and the light stayed where she had left it.