Black and grey traditional chest tattoo of a skull-faced woman cameo in a beaded frame, flanked by ornate scrollwork, on a chest.

Skull cameo with scrollwork on a chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large chest tattoo shows a skull-faced woman in profile inside a beaded oval cameo frame, holding a rose near her chest. Ornate acanthus-style scrollwork extends out to both sides across the collarbones. The work is rendered in black ink with smooth grey shading that gives the scrolls and cameo depth, and the image is entirely black and grey.

Traditional Chest Skull Cameo Woman Rose Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men of Scarrow Pit said the lady in the oval frame had been down the shaft before any of them, and that she kept the Low Seam the way a widow keeps a larder, counting everything twice. Her face was bone, but she turned it towards whoever came near, and she held a rose against her breast so the damp could not get at it.

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Nell Fairclough scraped whiting for the chapel windows and had never once been underground. The Monday her brother Joe went down the Low Seam and did not come up, the overman said roof fall and the company sent a clerk with a form. Nell took her mother's lamp and went down the old drift on her own, where the air tasted of iron and the walls sweated like a stone jug. At the end of it, cut into the coal face and lit by her lamp alone, was the lady, pale and patient, with a rim of pyrite beads around her.

The lady said nothing. She laid her palm flat on the rock and the rock opened like a letter read in the wrong order. Joe was sitting against a tram with his lamp still burning beside him, cold but unhurt. The lady held out her hand, and Nell understood the price without being told. She had no rose. It was February. She dug in her apron pocket and found the pressed one from her mother's Bible, brown as tea, and gave that instead.

A month later the chapel's new panel was fixed above the font, with scrollwork spreading either side of a cameo. Somebody had pressed a rose into the carving at its centre, grey as ash, and scratched Nell's name on the back of the wood. Nobody at Scarrow Pit lost a man in the Low Seam after that, though nobody would say whether the lady had kept her rose or been paid in it.