Neo-trad style tattoo on a lower abdomen showing a shaded skull flanked by two red roses, with black scrollwork and arrows.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and roses on the lower abdomen

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A shaded skull sits at the centre of the lower abdomen, flanked by two red roses and black scrolling ornament. Arrows cross the design near the roses, and the skull has soft grey shading with some warm tones. The image is a close crop of a bare midriff with a navel piercing, and the subject's hand holds a dark waistband at the lower edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Thursday, the fourteenth. Father pulled the old wall down at the back of St Hild's this morning and turned out a skull the colour of weak tea, packed in the rubble with two iron arrowheads. He would not let me touch it. He carried it to the lych gate in both hands, the way Mrs Pryce carries her Sunday bread, and set it on the bench as if it might still take offence at being moved.

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Mrs Abbott from the almshouses says the bones belong to a bell-founder who went down with his barque off the Scar in 1791, and that his widow planted the damask roses along that wall so she could see them from her kitchen window. Nobody alive remembers her name. The roots had wound through his ribs like wire through a basket, and Father said it was a poor sort of marriage that held a man up that long after the water had him.

I cut three roses from the bush this evening, the blooms still tight and dark at the heart, and wrapped their stems in my spare shawl. Father asked where I was going and I told him the harbour, which was half a lie. I went as far as the forge instead and laid the roses in the cold ash by the anvil, where the old founder once kept his moulds warm.

When I came home the skull was still on the bench, the lantern guttering beside it. I did not move it. I left the window open so the smell of the roses would find him in the night.

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