Illustrated skull design with feathers, a jewelled headpiece and a wreath of flowers and leaves on a pink background, shown as a drawn design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with feathers and flower wreath

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A detailed drawing of a human skull wearing a headpiece of feathers, beads and flowers, framed by a wreath of leaves and blossoms inside a rectangular border. The linework is bold and dark, with stippled and shaded areas on the skull and foliage. The palette uses muted teal, pink, purple and cream on a flat pink background, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Neo-trad Botanical Skull Feather Flower Wreath Leaves Headpiece Bead

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Row will say whose skull it was, so you have stopped asking. Your grandmother pulled it from the spoil heap the spring the drift flooded, rinsed it under the yard tap and never once let it sit bare on the mantel after that. Every Whit Friday she dresses it the way she dressed her own hats for chapel: jay feathers wired at the crown, a band of blue glass beads from the haberdasher's ribbon bin, and a wreath of holly and paper roses that she pins through the leaves so the wind cannot take them. This year the wire has gone stiff and the job is yours, kneeling on the lino with your tongue between your teeth while the kettle hisses behind you.

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By ten the band from the Lodge is tuning up outside the Miners' Hall and the whole street smells of wet wool and carbolic. You carry the skull up the hill on a cushion, both hands under it, the way the boys carry the banner pole. The feathers catch the drizzle and the petals start to bleed pink onto the leaves. People step aside without looking at you, which is how you know they have seen it before and do not need to see it again.

At the Hall steps, Albert Coulthard, who has checked the weights at the screens for thirty years, stops you with two fingers on the cushion. He says the dead should be left where they were put. You tell him the dead have been up Front Street every Whit Friday since before he had a pit boot to his name, and that your grandmother is watching from the window of number nine. He takes his cap off, looks at the feathers for a long time, then falls in beside you without a word.

The band strikes up. The procession moves off along the cinder path towards the allotments, and when you look back at the corner the pink paper roses are still stuck fast to the holly, every one of them holding on in the rain.