Side of a torso showing a shaded skull with pink roses, blue accents and ink drips in a painterly, watercolour-like style on the ribs.

Skull and roses watercolour on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded skull sits above a cluster of pink and mauve roses with green leaves, set on the side of the ribs. Soft grey shading and loose dark brushstrokes frame the skull, while blue and pink tones bleed into the surrounding splatters. Dripping lines run down from the roses, and the composition is asymmetrical with the skull on the upper left and the flowers spilling downward.

Ribs Skull Rose Leaves Brushstroke Ink drip Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third winter the big top at Harrow and Stiles had faded to the colour of weak tea, so Mother Ottoline set me to repainting the banners. I was fourteen and could not draw a horse without it looking drowned. She gave me a jar of rose madder, a cracked tin of lamp black and a brush with no tip left, and told me to stop trying to be neat.

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Our last act was a juggler with bad knees and a plaster skull the strongman carried in a hatbox. Every night it sat on the centre pole under the lamps while the crowd thinned to twelve people and a dog. I painted it grey, then wetter, then grey again, letting the black run down the wood in long threads, because the rain got into everything and the canvas drank it like a sponge.

On the night the lorry would not start, Ottoline walked out to the field, looked at the banner and laughed until she coughed. "Roses on a skull," she said. "Somebody will pay for that." I thought she was mocking me. By morning three roses had bloomed across the flatbed's tailboard, pink where I had dragged blue through them, dripping like sugar left out in the rain.

We never sold the show. We sold the banners, one to a bakery in Ludlow and one to a vicar who wanted something bright for harvest. I still have the brush with no tip. Every stroke I make with it comes out looking like weather.