Neo-traditional tattoo on the thigh of a skull in an ornate oval cameo frame, with red roses, a beaded chain and a pendant.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull in cameo frame with red roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey skull sits inside an ornate silver-grey oval frame with scrolled detailing and leaf accents. Red roses wrap around the frame, and a beaded chain hangs from the skull's jaw to a pendant at the bottom of the design. The black and grey shading contrasts with the saturated red petals against a dark background.

Neo-trad Thigh Skull Rose Pendant Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of February the silver frame had cooled on the bench, and Mrs Hollis still had not sent the likeness. Ada filed the scrolls by lamplight the way her father had taught her, threading the little jet beads onto their chain one by one so her hands had something to do besides shake.

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The letter came on the Thursday, folded twice and smelling of coal smoke. Her husband had been a stonemason who kept a skull on his windowsill to remind him of the price of Sundays, and he had asked, in writing, for that skull and no other face. Ada read it twice. Then she sketched the roses in red enamel, mixing the pigment from the same tin her father had used for the Crawley orders, and laid the grey shading over the bone until it looked less like a drawing than something left out in the weather.

When Mrs Hollis came for it in March, she did not weep. She turned the cameo over in her gloved palm, found the pendant at the bottom with its tiny catch, and pressed it open. Inside was a curl of hair the colour of wet sand. "He'd have hated a face," she said. "Anyone can paint a face."

Ada watched her go down Pinfold Street with the frame held against her coat like a hymnal, the beads swinging from the skull's teeth. She thought about her father's tin, which was nearly empty, and about how many more roses she would have to learn to make before the spring orders came in.