Realistic skull tattoo with shaded black and grey bone, red and blue roses and a torn skin effect, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large skull fills the centre of the image, with deep black shading in the eye sockets and nasal cavity and grey tones across the bone. Red and blue roses sit on either side, and dark streaks mimic torn skin around the skull's edges. The tattoo is photographed straight on against a shiny plastic background, with the skin tone and ink colours clearly visible.

Realism Calf Skull Rose Torn skin Teeth

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

The lorry came off the ferry at ten past four with its trailer seal already cut, and Dev Halloran had the decency to look embarrassed about it. I took his passport and manifest into the glass booth and read them twice while rain ran down the window in long grey streaks.

Keep reading

Forty pallets of roses, the manifest said. Red and blue, dyed, bound for a wholesaler in Chatham with a funeral order on Friday. Blue roses are never really blue, my father used to say, they are white roses that have been drinking. I had not thought about him in a year, and I thought about him now, standing in the wet with a clipboard while Dev lifted the curtain and showed me what was under the plastic sheeting.

It was not roses underneath. Pressed flat between the pallets were sheets of tracing paper, the kind an illustrator uses, each one covered in a skull with its jaw open and its sockets black as wet slate. The edges had been torn by hand, ragged and deliberate, so the skulls looked as though they were climbing out of something. Dev said his sister drew them and paid him in tea to carry them. I believed him about the tea.

I signed him through. What else could I do with a lorry full of other people's grief and a seal I could not prove he had cut? In the wing mirror I watched red and blue petals lift off the tailgate and skid across the car park like loose wrapping, and I thought of the corner of his passport I had torn off by mistake, still in my coat pocket where I had put it without noticing.