Black and grey skull beneath a crown, with two red roses and ink splatter tattooed across an upper arm.

Skull, crown and roses on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A skull wearing a crown sits at the centre of this upper arm tattoo, framed by two red roses on the left and scrolling floral linework. The skull and crown are shaded in soft greys with fine black outlines, while the roses are filled with red ink. Loose black and red splatters run down from the base of the design, and the photo is taken side-on against a plain black top.

Upper arm Skull Crown Rose Flourish Scroll Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-room smelled of paraffin and wet wool, and Ada had her hands full of other men's brass checks when the whistle went again. Three long blasts from Bellgrove shaft. She dropped the tokens back into their rack and ran.

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Outside, rain had turned the pit heap to black soup, and women spilled onto the cobbles with shawls over their heads. Someone had chalked a crowned skull on the Institute wall, a joke about the manager, and nobody had scrubbed it off. Ada passed beneath it without looking up. Her brother Joe was on the back shift. She had watched him go down at six, his dinner tin knocking against his hip.

The roses were Mam's. She grew them in a tin bath behind the privy, red as a split knuckle, and swore they would not die while the pit kept its hands off her boys. Ada had a cutting in her apron pocket, wrapped in a damp rag, meant for the chapel wall where the ground was soft. She held it against her chest like a hymn sheet.

The first man out was old Petrie, black to the eyes, his lamp still hooked on his belt. He spat into a puddle, red running from his lip into the coal on his chin. 'Bellgrove's not lost,' he said. 'They've got the cage going.' Ada kept her eyes on the shaft mouth. When Joe came up at last, grinning through the grime like a man who had cheated death at cards, she pressed the rag into his hands and told him to plant it himself, by the chapel wall, where the ground was soft.