Pen drawing of a shaded skull wrapped in roses and leaves, with a snake coiled at its base, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, roses and snake design drawing

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed ink drawing of a human skull with roses and layered leaves framing its crown and eye sockets. A snake coils around the lower part of the skull, and a small skull sits at the snake's head, with a crescent and star and dripping ornaments below. The linework is fine and shaded in a single brown tone, with swirling filigree on the right side, and the drawing sits on a pale background with drawing pens at the top right.

Realism Botanical Skull Rose Snake Leaves Filigree Crescent Star Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the wood is damp and it will spit, but you will not want to miss the part where the snake talks. Everyone in Corrow says the roses at the edge of Harrow Wood were planted by Mab Tennant, who had hands like old roots and no patience for the vicar.

Keep reading

Mab had one rule for her garden. Nothing that bloomed was to be picked before the frost, and nothing that crept was to be killed. So when the grass snake came up through the bean rows each evening, she set out a saucer of milk and let it be. It grew long and pale as a bootlace, and one night it lifted its head over the wall and asked her for a thing she did not want to give.

It wanted the name of the boy who had taken her husband to the coast and not brought him back. Mab would not give it. Instead she offered a bargain: every spring she would give the snake the first rose to open, and in return it would keep the lane clear of whatever walked it after dark. The snake agreed. That is why the roses on the wall grow out of the eye holes of the old skull Mab dug from the ditch, and why a smaller skull sits at the snake's jaw, the bell-ringer's dog, which had been the first to walk the lane and the first to stop.

Mab has been in the churchyard forty years now. The snake still comes at dusk, I am told, coiled round the crooked gatepost with the crescent lantern swinging above it. If you walk past Harrow Wood after the rain, you will see the wax drip from that lantern onto the gravel, and you can count the drops, as Mab taught us, one for every rose she never picked.