Black and grey Japanese style skull tattoo with curling waves and cherry blossom flowers across a person's upper back and shoulder.

Skull, waves and blossom on a back piece

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large realistic skull dominates the upper back, with its eye sockets and jaw shaded in deep black and grey. Curling Japanese style waves wrap around the skull on the left, and white cherry blossom flowers with a pair of circular outlines sit over the shoulder blade on the right. The shading is smooth and detailed, and the photograph is taken from behind at an angle with a plain light background.

Japanese Realism Back Shoulder Skull Wave Cherry blossom Flower Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You were holding the lantern when Nell Garrow waded out past the slipway, swearing at the cold, because the spring tide had dragged the old harbour bell off its frame and wedged it between two barnacled stones. The water rose to her knees, then her hips. Behind the fish market the cherry tree the council kept threatening to cut had dropped its blossom early, and the petals kept arriving on the swell, pale as paper, turning in the eddies as if they were deciding where to go.

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"Hold it steady," she said, her hands already blue. The bell came up grey with weed, its lip cracked in a neat curl like a wave about to break, and inside it a skull of crusted iron had rusted into the clapper, grinning at you through the verdigris. Nobody in Scarrow had rung it since the lifeboat was lost in 1931, though everybody knew the story and told it differently. Nell laughed, wiped the grit from her eyes and said the old men would argue for a week about whether to mend it or sink it deeper.

Between you, you carried the bell up the slipway. The moon, nearly full, sat inside its own reflection on the harbour as if it had been waiting for someone to notice. Nell set her end down on the cobbles and sat beside it, breathing hard. "Tomorrow we ring it for the fleet," she said. You didn't tell her that you had already bought a ticket for the morning boat. You only watched the petals drift past the wall and out toward the open sea, where the waves kept folding themselves over and over.