Greyscale tattoo design of a shaded skull with crossed pistols and two red roses, drawn as a flash sheet with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with crossed pistols and red roses

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A shaded skull sits at the centre, with crossed flintlock pistols beneath it and a red rose on each side. Smoke or flame curls rise from the top of the skull, and white tribal-style swirls frame the composition. The skull and pistols are rendered in fine pencil-like greyscale shading, while the roses are coloured in red with dark shadows.

Realism Skull Pistol Rose Smoke Flame Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the powder again, so Ada Penhallow fired the last shot of the Michaelmas fair with damp fingers and hoped the flint would catch. Her shooting gallery stood at the end of the lane past the cattle pens, and its two flintlock pistols hung on a nail above the stove. Their grips were bound with silver wire, and a skull was cut into each lock plate. Nobody in Ashcombe would touch them. Her husband had won them at cards from a man who never came back to pay his debt.

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On the third night a gentleman in a grey coat strolled up to the board and wagered that she could not hit the painted skull at forty paces. Ada asked what he would stake. He laid a red rose on the counter, its stem still wet, and said it was the nearest thing to a heart he had brought with him. She took the bet. When she fired, smoke rose from the muzzle and curled upward into the shape of a bare skull, and the crowd went quiet.

She realised then that the gentleman had not once looked at the target. He was watching the pistols, and his eyes were the colour of pewter. Ada loaded both barrels, pointed them together at the board, and pulled the triggers at the same moment. The two clouds of smoke met over the crossed barrels and hung there, and when they thinned the grey coat was gone. In its place lay two roses, one on each side of the painted skull, and the skull itself had split clean through the brow.

Ada hung the pistols back on their nail and pressed the roses between the pages of the fair ledger. Each spring after that, when the stove was lit, the smoke climbed the canvas wall and took the shape of a skull, and nobody in the lane thought to ask why.