Black and grey skull with a crown of roses tattooed on the side of a finger, shaded in stippled dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a finger

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small skull wearing a crown of roses is tattooed across the side of a finger. The skull and roses are drawn in fine black linework with stippled shading that gives the forms their volume. The photograph is black and white, with the hand angled toward the camera against a dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Hand Skull Rose 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

The frost had heaved the top soil off the lower field in the night, and when you walked out with the feed buckets the furrows glittered like sugar. Something small and pale sat in the stubble by the gate. You crouched, brushed away the rime, and found a clay pipe bowl moulded into the shape of a skull, its brow wreathed in tiny roses, the glaze crazed with age.

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Back in the kitchen, Nan Hettie turned it in her palm without looking up from the bread dough. 'That's from the rectory,' she said. 'Mrs Ashdown had a set made when the roses came in. Fancied herself a bit of a dark lady.' She laughed, then stopped. 'Your grandad smoked one every Sunday until the rectory was sold, and the rest went in the midden.'

You washed it under the pump while the kettle spat on the range, working cold water into the grooves of the crown with a bristle brush until each rose showed its petals again. The fine stippling round the eye sockets came up grey, then black, as if someone had shaded it by hand one dot at a time. It weighed almost nothing. It felt as though it had been waiting.

By dusk the frost had come back hard. You carried it down to the old rose hedge by the fence, where the bare canes were tied to the wire, and set it in the bed where the roots had gone to sleep. Nan watched from the back door with her arms folded. 'Leave it,' she said. 'Something should keep the roses company.'