Black and grey botanical tattoo of a ram skull, antlers and leaves on the outer thigh of a standing person in black shorts and knee socks.

Skull, antlers and leaves on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a ram skull with curled horns at its centre, with a pair of antlers rising above it and a sunflower-like rosette behind. Leaves fan out around the motif, and a smaller skull sits on each side. The work uses fine linework and layered shading in black ink and grey wash, with dense hatching in the leaves and antlers. The photograph is taken full length from the waist down, with the tattoo sitting on the thigh against a pale brick wall and gravel ground.

Botanical Blackwork Thigh Skull Antler Sunflower Leaves Flower Deer

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram came up out of the sea the spring the herring failed, and the people of Scarrow took it for a sign, since nothing else had come out of the sea that year but cold water and bad news. Old Nan Ebbe found it at first light lying in the wrack, its curled horns crusted with salt. She cut the skull clean with her knife, carried it up the cliff path in a sack, and said it was the handsomest thing she had ever held.

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She set the skull in the sunflower field her husband had planted against the wind, where the stalks stood taller than a child and every head turned to face the mainland at dawn, as if expecting a boat. That night the flowers swung round to face the sea. In the morning a stag stood at the field gate, then another, and each laid a single antler at the skull's feet and walked off into the heather. By midsummer the pile was higher than a man's knee, and a gull and a hare had been brought in to keep watch on either side.

A surveyor from the mainland came in July with a notebook and asked why the island's flowers faced the wrong way. Nan told him they were waiting for the herring, which was true enough. On the day the last antler was laid, the nets came up silver, and the boats came home so heavy the harbour wall groaned.

The surveyor wrote none of it down. That evening the leaves folded over the skull like hands, and Nan went in and shut her door on the sea.