Realistic skull with two red roses and smoky shading, tattooed along the side of the ribs.

Skull and roses on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A realistic human skull sits at the centre of the design, with smoky grey shading curling around it. Two large red roses, one above the skull and one below, add strong colour against the black and grey. The shading is smooth and detailed, and the tattoo fills the side of the torso from the ribs towards the hip.

Realism Ribs Skull Rose Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The porter at Harrowgate Road found the tin on the 6.40 this morning, wedged under the third bench where the engine smoke settles. Inside were two pressed roses gone the colour of rust, a playing card with a skull inked on the back, and your father's signal lamp key. I have kept it in the drawer of the booking office since Tuesday because I could not bring myself to post it. The station master wants it cleared before the inspector comes through on Friday, so you will have to tell me what to do with it.

The card had been folded so many times that the skull's jaw had split along the crease, but the roses stood out as fierce as ever, one above the eye sockets and one tucked low by the cheekbone. Grey smoke curled off the bone as though somebody had only just blown out a match. I remember Joe Tanner laughing about having it drawn on a bet, and how the man with the needles kept asking him whether he wanted it to look more alive or more dead. Joe never did decide.

I opened the tin properly this afternoon. Under the key was a scrap of paper in your father's hand: Keep the lamp burning till the last train is in. He never wrote a line in his life that was not an order, so I took it as one. I went up to the box at six and lit the lamp myself. The 9.15 came through at twenty past, slow and certain, and I kept the green showing until its wheels had gone quiet down the line.

Come home at the weekend. Bring the roses if you still have them. I will put the kettle on and we can decide together what to do with a skull that has outlasted every hand that held it.

Your loving aunt, Marjorie