Black and grey pencil drawing of a skull with a guitar headstock, two roses and music notes, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, guitar and roses design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil sketch of a shaded skull with a guitar neck and headstock running across its lower face, with the words Fender Jaguar on the headstock. Two open roses sit at the lower left and right, and loose musical staves and notes surround the skull. The drawing uses soft graphite shading and fine ink-style outlines on a pale background.

Skull Guitar Rose Music note Sheet music

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler's wife in Carrow Dale had been dead nine winters when the dance hall at Settle Cross began to hear a guitar that nobody was playing. Old Mrs Hebble swore it came up through the floorboards on Saturdays, a bright thin tune with a rattle at the end of each phrase, like teeth set loose in a jar.

Keep reading

The men who ran the hall were not the kind to scare, so they sent for Tom Ansty, who mended amplifiers in the town and owned a Jaguar he never let anyone drive. He came with a torch and a box of valves and sat on an upturned crate beneath the stage. For three nights he heard nothing but the tick of pipes. On the fourth, a note rang out so clear that the dust jumped off the rafters.

He went up the cellar steps with the torch held high and found the instrument leaning against the coal chute, its neck pale as bone, the headstock grinning with its six tuning pegs. Roses had been pressed into the varnish, faded to brown. Round the body hung loose strings of music, notes falling off the staves like rain. Tom knelt and touched the neck, and the whole cellar hummed.

He did not take it home. He took his own guitar down from the hook and played until dawn, badly at first, then properly, and the hall above him fell quiet to listen. When the sun came through the high window the Jaguar was silent, and the roses on its body had opened a little more, the way they do when someone has been heard.