Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with a skull framed by roses, leaves, lace motifs and dotted chains, shown on paper with no body placement.

Skull, roses and lace design on paper

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a skull at the centre, surrounded by open roses, a rosebud, leaves and clusters of lace-like flowers. Fine hatched shading gives the skull and leaves depth, while stippled dots form hanging chains with diamond-shaped drops. The design fills a loose, curved composition on a sheet of off-white paper.

Botanical Dotwork Skull Rose Rosebud Leaves Lace Flower Dotted chain

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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

Your great-grandmother would not let anyone sit at her pillow after the boats went out. Forty pins in a cushion of green wool, and each one had to find its hole or the whole pattern would walk off the paper like a drunk man off the quay. She kept the window shut, because the draught made the thread sulk.

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The pattern came from Mrs Tremayne, whose husband had gone over the bar in February with his brother and the good oars. She wanted a shawl for the chapel with a skull at its heart, not to frighten anyone, she said, but so the women would know death had a face and a sense of order. The chandler's boy drew it in pencil, shading the cheekbones with tiny hatched lines. Your great-grandmother pricked it out and built the roses round it, open and heavy as wet sails, then the leaves, then the clusters of lace flowers she called fillers, though she never filled anything with them.

Along the lower edge she set the chains. Dots of thread, one after another, and at the end of each a little diamond drop. She tied one diamond for every person the harbour lost in her lifetime, and the shawl grew heavier as the years went on. The last diamond she left bare. I asked who it was for, and she said the sea had not yet told her, and she would wait until it did.

The shawl hung on the chapel hook for nine winters. When Mrs Tremayne finally wore it down to the quay, the diamonds swung against her skirts with a sound like small bells, and the gulls came down to peck at the dots as if they were seed. Nobody ever learned whose name belonged on the last drop, so it still hangs open, and I think that is how she meant it to be.