Flash drawing of a skull wreathed in daisies, with stippled white linework and yellow centres on a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with daisy crown

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A white line drawing of a human skull with a crown of daisies draped over the top of the cranium and around the eye sockets. The skull is rendered in fine stippled and hatched linework, with the petals left largely open and the flower centres shaded in yellow. The design is centred on a plain charcoal background with generous margins.

Botanical Skull Daisy Flower crown Flower Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has sealed the lane since Tuesday, and the only visitor in three days is the one who knocked at the kitchen door at dusk, shaking flakes from a coat with no buttons. Mother is upstairs with the fever, the fire is down to its last split log, and you are the one who has to decide whether to let him in.

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He doesn't give a name. He sits at the end of the long table with his hands flat on the wood, and when you set down the stew he regards it as if it has let him down. Above the hearth, where the brass clock should hang, stands the pot of daisies your mother keeps alive on the sill, defying the frost, white petals open and centres bright as egg yolk. When the draught moves through the room the petals tremble. He notices you noticing. "She won't let them die," you say. "She says flowers are for the living, so the living should be the ones who decide when to stop."

Sometime past midnight you wake with your cheek on the table. The bowl is empty and his chair is pushed back neatly, as though someone had been polite. Upstairs the fever has broken. Mother is awake and asking for tea, wearing the faraway look she gets after dreaming of the sea.

At first light the lane is still buried, but a path of boot prints runs from the back door to the gate and stops at the wall where the daisies grow. You go to the window box and count the blooms twice. There are more than there were yesterday, and the snow around them has not melted, not even a little.