Painted tattoo design of a shaded skull framed by blue and purple anemone-style flowers, leaves and grey scrollwork on a pale background.

Skull with blue and purple flowers design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A painted design showing a grey, shaded human skull at the centre, surrounded by blue and purple flowers with dark centres, large leaves and fine black scrollwork. The linework is detailed in the scrolls and foliage, while the skull and petals use soft watercolour washes and ink splatters across the pale background. Blue and purple dominate the colour, with black and grey used for the skull and ornamental work.

Botanical Skull Flower Anemone Leaves Scrollwork Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windflowers were open on the north wall when Death came up the hill road with a sack over his shoulder. Idony Marsh was nine years old and had no business being brave, but she put down her trowel anyway and asked him what he wanted with her father.

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He wanted Tobin Marsh, the king's gardener, who had dug graves for the whole of Ashpenny for thirty years and been paid in nothing but thanks. Idony said he could have him once he had seen the garden. She walked him along the scrolled beds she had laid out in ferns and ivy, past the anemones with their petals blue at the rim and bruise-purple at the heart, and Death stopped at each one as though he had been waiting a long time to be shown something.

When he asked what the flowers were for, she told him what her father had told her: that a windflower opens only over ground where someone is missed. Death untied his sack and took out a grey skull, polished smooth by a great many years, and set it down among the leaves. The petals turned towards it and opened wider, and for a moment the whole bed smelled of rain. Death sighed the way a man does when he has lost an argument he wanted to lose. He said the garden would do for a while, and he left Tobin his trowel and his years.

Each spring after that, the people of Ashpenny found the skull in the middle of the anemones, with the blue and purple flowers crowded round it like mourners, and nobody dug it up. The old king said a kingdom needed one thing that kept its promises, and Idony said it was the only honest thing Death had ever left behind.