Black and grey skull tattoo with roses and a thorny vine across the back of a hand, photographed against a black background.

Skull and roses on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A grey skull with shaded eye sockets and teeth sits at the centre of the design, with three roses with soft highlights above it and a thorny vine curling across the knuckles. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, with dark tones at the edges of the skull and lighter greys on the petals. The hand fills the frame against a plain black background, and another tattoo is partly visible at the top edge.

Realism Hand Skull Rose Teeth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the second week of October the dance cards at the Esplanade Palais had run out, so Mrs Pell sent me down to the print shop on Harbour Street with a shilling and a sketch Walter had drawn on the back of a bill of fare. A skull grinned up from the paper, three roses tumbling over its brow, and a thorny vine snaked round the jaw as if it meant to keep the teeth shut.

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Walter played trumpet for the Saturday band and didn't say much, but he'd said enough about that drawing. His father had painted the same skull on a rowing boat's hull, he told me, the year it went down off the pier with two men still aboard. The roses were for the wife who had waited on the sand. I didn't believe the story then, and I'm not certain I believe it now, but I believed the way he tapped the paper with one finger, shading the eye sockets with his thumbnail until they went as dark as the harbour at night.

The printer's boy had no patience for shading. He ran the card through in a single grey, and the roses came out pale against the ink, so the skull looked like it was smiling through fog. That night I watched every girl who picked one up turn it over, check the vine, and tuck it into her glove. Nobody asked what the skull was for. They only wanted to dance with the man who had drawn it.

At midnight the lights dropped and Walter lifted his trumpet for the last waltz. He looked across the cloakroom at me, then at the stack of unclaimed cards on my counter. There were forty of them, all spoiled by the same cheap grey. I handed him the top one, and he slid it into his waistcoat pocket without a word, the thorns still pressing faintly through the card's edge.