Realism tattoo of a shaded grey skull with pink roses on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded skull sits on the thigh with two pink roses rising above and beside it, with a few small leaves at the edges. The skull has soft, detailed shading around the eye sockets and teeth, and the roses use pink tones with darker grey shading for depth. The close, slightly angled framing shows the tattoo across the upper leg, with a hand visible at the top edge of the frame.

Realism Thigh Skull Rose Leaves

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

Mrs Pascoe kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, and she had one rule for her lodgers: nobody slept in the back room, the one that looked down on the bramble bank where the tide left its leavings. Nobody asked why. The window there had been painted shut for as long as anyone could remember, and the wallpaper had gone the colour of weak tea.

Keep reading

In the spring the herring failed, her daughter Lowenna went down the bank after driftwood and came back up with a skull in her apron. It was white as a saucer, with a wild rose growing through one eye socket as if the bramble had been trying to hold it. Her mother told her to bury it or keep it, but not both. Lowenna kept it. She set it on the sill inside the back room, and every morning she poured the cold water from the kettle over its crown.

By June two roses had climbed the frame, pink as a sunburnt cheek, and the skull grinned out through the glass at the bay. A sailor called Teague paid a month in advance to sleep there. He left before dawn with his boots in his hand, saying the teeth had told him the hour he would drown. Lowenna laughed at that, until one night she found the sill bare and the roses trailing out under the door toward the cliff path.

She followed them down to the shingle. The skull lay in the moonlight with its roses open on either side, and out past the point a boat's bell was ringing for nobody. Lowenna lifted it, carried it home against her chest, and set it back under the glass. The window stayed shut after that, and the bramble bank went quiet, and no lodger ever asked to sleep in the back room again.