Black line drawing of a skull entwined with three roses, leaves and thorny stems, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a human skull on the left, with three roses growing up its right side, one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. Leaves and thorny stems wind between the flowers and the skull. The design uses bold black outlines with minimal interior shading on white, and the composition is tall and narrow.

Traditional Skull Rose Leaf Thorn Stem Flower

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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

Sit nearer, boy, the brazier is failing and my voice carries no further than the wall. You asked why Brother Anselm will not let the rose bed be cleared. I will tell you what the old men told me, and you may believe as much as you like.

Keep reading

The skull under the thorns was Hugh of Wenlow, steward to the bishop, who came to Holm in the year of the great frost to collect the abbey's tithe and left with nothing but a cough. He despised gardens. He called them vanity kept by idle hands, and he had the lay brothers grub out every cutting. When he died in the cold room, the abbot would not have him in consecrated ground, so they laid him by the wall where the earth was poor and forgot him.

The roses came anyway. Three bushes, wild from the hedgerows, grew up over the spot and would not be pulled. Their stems wound through his ribs and the bindweed climbed to his jaw, and the blooms opened redder every June than anywhere else in the garden. The brothers said the earth had a taste for him. Anselm said nothing, but he tied the canes up with his own rope and never once cut the thorns.

When I asked him last winter what the rose wanted, he laughed and took a single bloom from the lowest stem, the one that had grown through the eye socket. He set it in the skull's mouth, where the teeth had gone, and said, "Even a steward needs something to smell on the way down." Then he went back to his beads, and the rose stayed where he put it until the frost came and took it.