Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a skull with a pink rose, a feather, a songbird and beaded chains, with a pencil drawn in the lower right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, rose and feather design sketch

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a skull with a pink rose across its left side, a large feather rising above it and a small songbird perched on the right. Strings of beads and pendant-like drops hang around the skull, with leaves sketched around the rose. The linework is grey and soft, with shading on the skull and cheekbones, and only the rose petals are coloured in pink.

Botanical Skull Rose Feather Bird Bead Leaves

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 bird had been singing since the Tuesday the lodgers left without paying, and Mrs Hebden had decided it was a sign, though she could not yet tell of what. She kept it in the back parlour on the dresser, beside the skull her late husband had bought at a Whitby sale and called a bargain. Someone long ago had threaded a string of beads through its eye sockets, and the years had turned them grey, so the whole thing looked like a dinner guest who had stayed too late.

Keep reading

Mr Ansel Fry came back on the Thursday, sunburnt and apologetic, with a grey gull feather tucked behind one ear and a cardboard box under his arm. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a necklace of seed pearls with drops hanging from it, the sort a woman wears to the Pier Pavilion on a Saturday. "My sister's," he said. "I want them to cover what I owe. I am not a man who keeps debts from the dead." Mrs Hebden counted the drops, six of them, and then a seventh that had no business being there.

She took the pearls to Jacob Lusk on the harbour front, who weighed them, called them paste, and then, after a long look at her over his spectacles, admitted they were real but worth less than she hoped. She came home with eleven pounds and the feather, which Mr Fry had left on the stairs like a receipt.

That night the bird sang the tune her husband used to whistle over the washing up, and for the first time in eleven years she whistled back. The skull, for once, kept its opinions to itself.