Black and grey realistic tattoo of a skull with a monarch butterfly, a rose and a rosary with a cross, on a limb.

Skull, butterfly and rose with rosary in realism

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic black and grey tattoo shows a human skull with a monarch butterfly resting on its crown. A rose sits below the skull, and a rosary of dark beads runs down the side to a cross at the base. Smooth shading, strong highlights and deep shadows give the skull and petals a three-dimensional look against a dark background.

Realism Other Skull Butterfly Rose Rosary Cross Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship Constance Vane had been twelve weeks out of Bristol when the cook found the skull in the bread locker, bleached and grinning, with a string of black beads looped through its jaw. Nobody aboard would say whose it was. Old Hobb the carpenter said it had come aboard at Lisbon in a sailor's sea chest, and that the sailor had gone over the side off the Azores with no one left to pray for him.

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Hobb took the skull to the rail every evening and talked to it the way some men talk to dogs. He tied the rosary to the rail and told the crew that a drowned man with no prayers will come back as a weight on the sternpost. Nobody laughed. The rose the cook had painted on the bread board that morning had begun to wilt in the salt damp, and that frightened them more than the skull did.

On the forty-first day a monarch came out of nowhere, a weak orange and black thing blown far from any land, and it settled on the skull's crown as if the bone were warm. Hobb did not shoo it. He sat on the hatch with his pipe unlit and watched it, and when the wind turned it did not fly off but stayed with them until the cliffs of Cornwall showed grey on the horizon.

At Falmouth Hobb buried the skull in the churchyard above the quay, wrapped in oilcloth, with the beads pressed into the earth over it. The butterfly lifted as the spade went in and turned south over the harbour wall, and the cook swore he saw it land on a rose bush that had no business blooming in November.