Black and grey pen illustration of a skull wreathed in sunflowers and wheat stems, with the word Virgo and the line delete your search history beneath it.

Skull and sunflowers with Virgo caption

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a skull with sunflowers, smaller blossoms and leaves spilling across its lower left side, and loose wheat-like stems rising to the upper right. The linework is fine and hatched, with grey wash shading on the skull and petals, and vertical striped lines fan out behind it to form a base. The caption Virgo and delete your search history sits below the drawing on a plain white background.

Botanical Skull Sunflower Flower Wheat Leaves Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull turned up in the barley stubble the week after the combine broke down, and Maud Pennock spent a whole afternoon deciding whether it counted as a crop. She carried it up to the farmhouse in a feed sack and set it on the windowsill between the seed catalogues and a jar of wheat, where it watched her do the accounts. Her brother Tom said it was the Harvest Virgo, the maiden who sorts the grain from the chaff, and that the field gave one back every seventh year to keep its books straight. Maud doubted the field, but she had a weakness for anything that kept records.

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Every morning the sunflowers she had tucked into the skull's empty eye sockets had turned to face the window, and the wheat in the jar had grown a finger's length overnight. Tom laughed. Maud, who sorted seed for a living and had never trusted anything that grew faster than it should, went through the dresser drawers and found a shoebox of old evidence: a receipt for a fortune-teller in Ludlow, a pamphlet on bees, and a card in her mother's handwriting that read, simply, ask the field what it wants.

She asked. She went out at dusk with the shoebox under one arm and the skull under the other, walked to the far edge of the stubble, and tipped the whole lot into a furrow. The receipts curled. The bee pamphlet went soft in the damp. The skull grinned at her for the first time, teeth bright in the last of the light.

By morning the sill was bare, the jar was empty, and the field had a single row of wheat standing exactly as high as Maud's shoulder, every head bent toward the farmhouse as though waiting to be told it had been forgiven.