Black and grey skull tattoo with roses, butterflies and a cobweb on an upper arm and shoulder, shown in two side-by-side views.

Skull and roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by roses, leaves, scrollwork, two butterflies and a cobweb at the lower edge. The shading is soft and detailed, with smooth grey gradients in the skull and roses and finer linework in the leaves and web. Two views of the same arm are shown side by side against a dark background, with a faint reddish wash visible in the cobweb and shoulder area.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Skull Rose Butterfly Leaves Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry reached Holm Cross gate at ten past three, which was the hour old Ansell always said nothing honest ever crossed. I stamped its papers anyway. The driver, a thin man with a grey stubble that matched his cab, had a manifest for four hundred cut roses bound for a wholesaler outside Dover, and the smell of them came through the open hatch so thick I could taste sugar at the back of my throat.

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He asked about the cobweb in the corner of the booth window. Ansell had never let anyone sweep it, and it had grown over the years into a grey lace that caught the sodium light and held it. I told him the spider was the only officer on the night rota who never called in sick. He didn't laugh. He looked at the brass skull paperweight on the desk, the one Ansell had bought in Seville and never explained, and said his sister used to keep one just like it on her windowsill in Lyme Regis, though she had put it in a drawer the year she stopped answering his letters.

I counted the crates against the manifest twice. Four hundred, as declared, except that one crate had a split in its lid and a single butterfly was lifting off the top bloom, pale and unhurried, drifting toward the ceiling of the booth. Ansell's ledger lay open beside me. Under the last entry, in his tidy hand, he had written: Let the roses through. Death keeps its own hours.

I lifted the barrier. The driver nodded and eased the lorry forward, and as its tail lights slid past the glass the web in the window shivered, every thread catching the red for a moment before the road swallowed them. The butterfly stayed with me in the booth until dawn, and I let it.