Pencil drawing of a skull design surrounded by butterflies, hibiscus-style blooms and daisies, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with butterflies and flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a human skull, with butterflies, large open flowers, a daisy and small clusters of dots arranged around its top and sides. The skull is rendered with soft graduated shading and fine hatching, and the wings and petals have delicate outlines. The image is monochrome graphite on a pale background, with the motifs grouped in a loose arc around the skull.

Botanical Skull Butterfly Flower Hibiscus Daisy Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed packets were the first thing Marjorie Pell lost track of after the funeral, and she spent the following March hunting through the potting shed for them while the rain drummed on the corrugated roof. Her brother had sown everything in rows so straight they looked ruled, and she found his handwriting on every paper sleeve: hollyhock, foxglove, a dark red hibiscus he had bought from a man at the Thursday market and never explained. The skull on the bench was another matter. It had been in the shed since before either of them could read, a yellowed thing that sat under a folded tarpaulin like a guest nobody wanted to name.

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She found the drawing folded inside it. Pencil on cartridge paper, soft at the edges where fingers had handled it over many winters. Someone had shaded the bone so carefully that the eye sockets seemed to hold a little dusk, and around the crown they had scattered flowers, a daisy at the base, two butterflies lifting off the brow as though they had only just decided to leave. Small clusters of dots ran along the cheekbone like seed heads. On the back, in her brother's cramped capitals: FOR WHEN THE BORDER IS FINISHED.

She went out into the wet and looked at the bed he had dug along the fence, the one she had let go to grass. The dots were there in the soil, she realised, pressed in by the same careless thumb. Marjorie knelt, pulled up the nettles with her bare hands, and began to plant the packets in the order the drawing suggested, skull last, a bare curve of stone at the top of the bed where the flowers would climb if they wanted to.