Pen-and-ink drawing of a skull with roses and wildflowers over pastel watercolour splashes, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Skull and roses with watercolour splashes

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A hatched pen drawing of a human skull is framed by roses and large petals, with a few sprigs of foliage on the left. Fine cross-hatched shading gives the skull its volume, while the flowers use lighter outlines. Soft purple, blue, green, pink, orange and yellow watercolour washes sit behind and around the motif on a pale textured background.

Botanical Skull Rose Flower Petal Foliage Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The colliery whistle went again before I'd finished the first line, so forgive the smudge. Mam has the lamp lit already and Dad's boots are steaming by the range, and I am sat at the end of the table with your box of paints, the little tin one with the cracked purple pan, because I could not bear to leave it in the drawer any longer.

I know what you will say. Nobody paints in Harrowgate Row. The walls are the colour of wet coal and the sky is the colour of the pit tip. But last Sunday I walked up past the heaps in the rain, and the puddles at the bottom of the slope had gone a sort of violet where the spoil leached. Then the sun came out behind the chapel and every puddle caught it at once. Pink, blue, a green like new bracken. I stood there until Mrs Pryce called me a fool from her step.

Then Tom came home with news from the lamp room about the old surveyor's brass skull that hangs on the office hook for luck. Somebody had polished it until it shone, and nobody could say who. He laughed when he told it. I did not. I came home and drew a skull with roses pushing out of the eye sockets, and petals like the chrysanthemums you brought me from the station garden. Then I washed the colour over it, the way you showed me, and let the purple run where it wanted.

I have propped it under the brass bowl on the sill. When the whistle goes in the morning, it is the first thing I see, and I think it is the only honest picture in the house.

Write me back. Tell me the sea is still grey, so I know the world is where I left it.

Yours always, Nell