Pencil drawing of a skull nestled among the petals of a rose with leaves, a neo-traditional tattoo design sketched on a spiral sketchbook page.

Skull in a rose, pencil flash design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a skull with a rose blooming around it, showing the cranium, eye sockets, nose cavity and clenched teeth. Layered hatching and cross-hatching create shading on the skull, petals and leaves, with fine outline strokes defining the petal veins. The design is drawn in greyscale on a white sketchbook page, centred with the spiral binding visible along the top edge.

Neo-trad Skull Rose Leaves Petal Teeth Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Carnhope believed the rose would take on the spoil heap. The shale up there was grey and bare as a plate, and the coal dust got into everything: the bread, the washing, the cuffs of the men coming up from the level at the end of a shift. Still, Tressa Bolitho dug a hole at the foot of the tip every spring and planted something from her kitchen window box, and every spring the something died.

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The autumn after the pit flooded, her husband Jory was still under the water in the number three shaft, and the pump men were carting up waste from the workings. Among the shale they brought her a skull, small, with a crack along the brow like a stitched seam. She carried it home in her apron and set it in the hole at the foot of the tip. She did not say a prayer over it. She only told it the lamp had gone out.

Come May, a rose broke through the spoil. Its petals opened in layers, pale at the edges, and its leaves were dark and cupped like hands. The children said the blooms had teeth. The women said it was the wrong sort of rose altogether, but they came up the track to look at it anyway, and they left crusts of bread at its roots.

Tressa kept the bush watered until she died, and it kept on blooming. When the new shaft was sunk over the hill, the men took the story with them and told it at their own tables. Whenever a man came up grey and quiet after a long shift, someone would ask him if he had been to see the rose.