Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a shaded skull, an ornate pistol and a red rose with white swirling flourishes, shown as a flash sheet with no body placement.

Skull, pistol and rose design

Realism · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a shaded human skull with an ornate flintlock pistol across its lower face, a red rose at the lower left and white scrolling flourishes around the composition. The skull and pistol are rendered in pencil with soft graded shading and fine detailing on the gun's engraved grip. The rose is the only colour element, set against the greyscale work on a pale background.

Realism Neo-trad Skull Pistol Rose Flourish Swirl Scroll

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the dog. Nobody tells this one sober, so pass the jug. It concerns Mother Ilse Varrow, who kept the last working gunsmith's shop on the salt road past Dunmere, and the Captain's wife who came to her one wet March with a flintlock wrapped in oilcloth and a rose pressed flat between two pages of a psalter. The lock was cracked, she said, and the grip had been carved by a man who loved his own hands more than his wife's patience. Ilse turned the pistol over in the lamplight and found the scrollwork along the stock was not decoration at all but a map of the coast, every cove and sandbar picked out in tiny curls.

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She mended it, and it took three weeks, because the spring was tempered wrong and she would not hurry a thing that had already been hurried once. On the last evening she set the rose on the bench beside it and asked the Captain's wife what she meant to do with a pistol that could not fire. The woman only smiled and said the thing had never been meant to fire. It had been meant to be looked at while a man decided whether he would come home. Ilse laughed until the kettle boiled over, and then she saw the woman was not joking.

The Captain came back in April, which surprised everyone, least of all his wife. He stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and his bones showing through his coat, and he looked at the pistol gleaming on the bench, and at the rose gone brown at its edges, and he said nothing at all. Ilse always said that was the cleverest thing a man ever did in that shop. Now drink up, the tide turns at midnight.