Black and grey pencil drawing of a shaded skull with a rose growing from its jaw and a triangle grid below, shown on white paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, rose and triangle design on paper

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design shows a human skull in profile with a shaded rose sitting where the lower jaw would be. Below the rose, a downward-pointing shape is filled with a grid of interlocking triangles. The skull and rose use soft pencil shading and fine outlines, while the triangles are drawn with crisp, even linework on a plain white sheet.

Realism Geometric Skull Rose Triangle Geometric pattern

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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

The grader stopped a dozen miles past the Cold Spring turn-off, and the driver, a lad called Tobin who chewed liquorice as if it owed him money, leaned out of the cab and said the road had found something. I walked back along the new cut with my theodolite case still in my hand. The skull lay face up in the grit with its jaw gone, and in the hollow where the jaw should have been a pale rose had pushed up through the caliche, its petals packed tight and grey with dust.

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I had surveyed for the county for nineteen years and trusted triangles more than people. Every culvert and truss I had ever signed off stood on them. So I knelt and did what I always did: I laid my rod from the skull to the nearest benchmark and counted. The rose sat exactly where a plumb line dropped from the centre of the skull's brow. Below it the blade had cut the earth into a downward wedge, and in that wedge the grit showed a faint lattice of lines, as if someone had ruled it long ago with a steady hand and left the weather to finish the job.

Tobin asked if we should call it in. I told him we would once I'd finished the sightline, because the county would send a man with a clipboard, and a clipboard man would have the rose under a culvert by Friday. So I drew my own map on the back of a tally sheet, every angle true, and marked the skull as point zero.

Two weeks later I drove back alone. The road was paved, a new sign read Scenic Overlook, and the centreline bent in a neat hook around a square of tarmac that nobody had thought to explain. On my map the skull still sits at point zero, and every bend in that road still turns around it.