Flash-style drawing of a skull wreathed in pink blossoms, leaves, a butterfly and a hummingbird, in muted pastel washes and black ink on a cream background.

Skull with blossoms and butterfly

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A detailed skull sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by pink and peach flowers, green leaves and dark branches. A monarch-style butterfly sits at the upper left and a hummingbird hovers at the right. The linework is fine and sketchy with hatched shading on the bone, and soft watercolour-like washes in muted pinks and oranges sit over a cream background, with a small dark circle carrying the words La Dolce Vita at lower right.

Botanical Skull Flower Blossom Butterfly Hummingbird Leaves Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Fennick House had been broken since Easter, so Mrs Oyelaran carried her cuttings up the stairs one pot at a time, nine floors with a flask of tea wedged under her arm. Nobody on the estate grew anything. The council planted grey paving and the pigeons took what was left.

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Her grandmother had told her about the skull that lives under the flowers. You plant what you cannot keep, the old woman said, and you keep the reminder close so you don't waste the blossom. Mrs Oyelaran did not believe a word of it, but she set the pots along the walkway rail anyway: peach and plum, a sprig of apricot, and one pink rose cut from a dead man's garden in Peckham.

In the third week of May a hummingbird came. The neighbours swore it was a trick of the light. It hung beside the rail with its needle beak in the rose, and a monarch settled on Walter's windowsill as though it had been invited. Walter came out in his slippers and stood very still. "That's the one my wife used to talk about," he said. "The one that turns up when somebody has finished being frightened."

Mrs Oyelaran did not ask him what he meant. She poured him tea from the flask and they watched the bird feed until the sun dropped behind the car park. In the morning the petals lay across the walkway like confetti, and the lift, for the first time since Easter, was working.