Coloured flash design of a green skull-faced woman with purple hair, roses, foliage and crossed bones, drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull-faced woman with roses and crossed bones

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing on paper shows a green, skull-faced woman with flowing purple hair, framed by pink roses, leaves and a grey ornamental scroll at the top. Crossed bones sit at the lower edge, with strings of beads and diamond-shaped drops hanging around the figure. The soft shading and detailed rendering give the piece a realistic, painted finish, with the purple and green dominating the palette.

Neo-trad Skull Woman Rose Flower Bead Chain Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abigail Thorne had kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps for thirty years, and in all that time no guest had ever asked her what the bones were for. They hung in the front hall above the umbrella stand, two of them crossed like a sailor's sign, and beneath them a string of jet beads she wore at her throat clicked whenever she climbed the stairs.

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The lodger in the attic room, a fiddler named Pell, asked her once, and she told him the plain truth. Her mother had sold her the bones for the price of a loaf, a long time before, on the understanding that they would be kept dry and hung where the sea wind could not reach them. Her hair, which had gone the colour of violets the winter her husband drowned, she did not dye. Her skin, the green of the rockpools at low tide, she did not explain. Pell played his fiddle on the steps every night after that, and she let him.

When the great storm came in October, the boats were out and the bell of the lifeboat house rang without stopping. Abigail climbed to the attic with a candle and found Pell's fiddle case open on the bed, empty. Out of the window a lamp moved along the harbour wall. She took the crossed bones from the hall, pulled the jet beads over her head, and walked down the steps into the spray, rattling as she went, until the men on the wall turned and saw the bones gleaming pale and followed the sound back to shore.

Pell came up the steps at dawn with a grey face and a pocketful of beads that had torn loose from her neck. He hung the bones back above the umbrella stand himself. Nobody asked him what they meant, and he never told them.