Realistic colour tattoo of a skull with red and pink roses and watercolour-style splashes on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey skull sits at the centre of the design, with a red rose above it and a pink rose below. Soft red, magenta and purple washes spread behind the skull, giving a watercolour effect. The tattoo is photographed straight on along a forearm, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Skull Rose Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the guy ropes, for the grass is wet and the dead are always listening. Sit on the upturned crate, Tom, you've been pushing the ghost train all afternoon and you look it. You know the Harvest Fair runs through Essex every autumn, and you know the Ambrose brothers kept the painted caravan at the end of the row. What you don't know is what they found under the floorboards when old Silas Ambrose died.

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It was a skull, grey as a river stone, and nobody could say whose. Silas swore a tinker in Colchester gave it to him for a night's board and a tune on the fiddle. Every evening the brothers set it on the gilded stool beside the fortune wheel, and every evening the lamplight caught it wrong, so the eye sockets looked wet and the teeth seemed to be smiling at a joke nobody had told them.

The roses came in the second week of rain. A red one, bruised at the edges, climbed up from behind the brow as though it had been pushed through the bone. A pink one bloomed low, by the jaw. Between them the air filled with a magenta smoke that no lamp had made. Mabel, who sold toffee apples from the next wagon, swore the stain spread a little more each night, like wine soaking into a linen cloth.

On the last night, young Eli Ambrose climbed in to take the skull down for the lorry. He felt no fear, only a cold draught and a single petal lying on the boards, still damp. He pressed it between the pages of the fair's ledger and went to bed. In the morning the petal had dried to paper, the skull was plain bone again, and the ledger's columns were bleeding red from the middle outwards. Eli still keeps that ledger, and he says the roses are only waiting for someone to sit on that crate and ask.