Pencil and coloured drawing of a shaded skull with a dagger, smoke wisps and a red rose with leaves, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, dagger and red rose design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A grey-shaded skull with a dagger through its upper part sits above a red rose with grey leaves, with thin smoke wisps curling around the skull and rose. The skull is rendered with soft graduated shading and detailed bone texture, while the rose has bold red petals with highlights. The design is shown on a pale sheet of paper with no body part visible.

Neo-trad Realism Skull Dagger Rose Smoke Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Point had been dead since Tuesday, so Maureen Pryce climbed the eleven flights with a bin bag over her shoulder and her knees complaining in the cold stairwell. On the landing between the tenth and ninth floors someone had chalked a skull on the breeze block, grinning, with a thin line of smoke rising from its crown. She stopped to get her breath and thought it looked more like her Terry than anything she'd seen in years, with his cigarette tucked behind one ear and his mouth always half open to say something clever.

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Flat 114 had been Terry's while he was alive, and it still smelled of his aftershave and the paraffin heater. The tin turned up when the landlord's man came about the boiler. It was a biscuit tin with a dented lid, painted with a red rose and grey leaves that had faded at the edges. Inside were letters in Terry's careful capitals, none of them addressed, and a bar receipt with a dagger drawn in biro through the total. She sat on the arm of the settee with the tin on her knees and read the first one. It was about the rent, about a man called Gerry who owed them money, and about a rose he had painted on the shutter of the lock-up so the kids would stop cutting through the car park. Every line was calm. None of it sounded like a threat, and that was worse.

She carried the letters down to the bins in the grey before dawn and struck a match on the side of the box. The paper curled and blackened like smoke off a skull's brow, and she watched until nothing was left but a few flakes that the wind took over the fence. The rose she kept. She pressed the lid shut, climbed the eleven flights again without stopping, and set the tin on the windowsill of 114, where the first light would catch the red before anyone else in the block was awake.