Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with roses on the forearm, with a hand with blue nail polish visible at the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows a large skull at the centre, with shaded roses above and below it. The shading is soft and detailed, with smooth grey gradients across the skull and petals. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink, and the photograph is taken at an angle with the hand in the lower part of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the galley to yourself before the four o'clock watch, and the range ticks as it cools. Salt spray has dried white on the porthole glass. Behind the tins of tinned peaches, someone has left a jar of rose conserve, its label gone soft and brown at the corners, and you know whose it is. Orrin bought it in Valparaíso every voyage and swore he didn't care for sweet things.

Keep reading

Orrin went over the side of your thinking in March, though it was his gut that gave out, not the sea. The bosun sewed him into canvas with a fire bar at his feet, and the mate read the service too fast because the wind was up. Before that, Orrin taught you to pipe choux with a horn nozzle and to keep a knife sharp enough to shave with. He had a skull and a bunch of roses inked along his forearm from a Callao parlour. He used to say the skull was for the sea and the roses were for whoever was waiting ashore, and he never said who that was.

The second mate wants something for the wardroom table tonight, a remembrance of sorts. You find the carpenter's pear-wood mould in the locker, the one shaped like a skull with its jaw hinged open, and you press sugar and conserve into it, working the thick paste into the eye sockets with your thumb. It sets pale and grey as old bone. You lay three real petals on the brow, pressed flat in the tin's last syrup.

At midnight the jar is empty. You wash it, dry it on your apron, and set it back on the shelf behind the salt where he would have kept it.

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