Colour and grey realism tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded skull, a red rose, a pale butterfly, bird silhouettes and a lettered banner.

Skull, rose and butterflies on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm tattoo combines a shaded grey skull with a large red rose at the lower arm, a white butterfly near the elbow, and dark bird silhouettes with small red hearts scattered between them. The skull and bird shading use smooth grey gradients, while the rose and hearts are rendered in saturated red. A partly visible banner with lettering runs along the bottom edge, and the photo is taken indoors in a studio with a bench and boxes behind.

Realism Forearm Skull Rose Butterfly Bird Heart Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up out of the river in the second week of thaw, and the miller's boy would not touch it until his mother had said the prayer for drowned things. Nobody in Hallow Ferrow could say whose it was. The priest said it was a king's, because it had gold teeth. The widow Ansel said it was her husband's, though he had gone south with the salt carts eleven years before and sent no word.

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She carried it up the hill in a basket lined with rose petals from the walled garden, because that was what she had to hand, and set it on the stone bench by the chapel door. Birds came to it that same evening, rooks and starlings and a pair of swifts that had no business being so far north in spring. They sat along the brow and the jaw and did not sing. In the morning there were small red hearts of rowan berries pressed into the moss around it, and a white moth the size of a hand resting on the bench with its wings open, as if drying.

Ansel did not go to the priest. She went to the ferryman, whose daughter could read, and asked her to write what the husband had always said at parting. The girl wrote it on a strip of linen, three words in a careful hand, and the widow tied it under the skull's jaw. By midsummer a red rose had climbed the chapel wall and opened above the bench, and nobody in the village could remember planting it.

The husband came home on the first frost, thinner and quieter, carrying nothing. He sat beside the skull until dark and asked whether the birds still came. Ansel said they did, every evening, and that she had stopped counting them. He said that was the right answer, and the moth lifted off the bench and went into the chapel as if it knew the way.