Black and grey dotwork and linework tattoo on the upper back and shoulder showing a skull with flowers and leaves growing from its crown and roots trailing below.

Skull with flowers and roots on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits at the centre of the design, with a cracked crown from which flowers, leaves and stems rise upward. Poppy-like blooms, a rose, a sunflower head and smaller wildflowers are drawn in fine lines with stippled dotwork shading. Thin roots spread from the base of the skull across the skin, and the composition wraps over the shoulder edge.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Back Skull Flower Root Leaves Rose Sunflower Poppy Wildflower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your boots on the Pryce plot, love, it's soft as a Sunday pudding after the rain. That's the yew's doing, not mine. My father dug that corner for forty years and never once hit a root that wasn't a root.

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The spring Ada Lacey died, she made me promise a thing I thought was daft. No box, she said. Put me in the bed under the kitchen window where the marigolds go, and let the roots have the lot. The vicar tutted. The parish council tutted louder. I dug it myself with the wide spade on a Tuesday in April, and at four foot my blade cracked into something hollow that rang like a bell pot. It was her head, mind, what the damp had left of it, and the crown had split clean along the seam.

Thing is, nobody had planted anything. Come June there were poppies coming up out of that split skull, red as a slapped cheek, then a rose the colour of weak tea, then a sunflower taller than the scarecrow, all of it nodding toward the back bedroom where she used to shell peas with the wireless on. Dr Lowther came to look and said the seeds must have been in the soil, which they were, and I said yes, doctor, and he went home. The Women's Institute wanted it for the show. I said no.

I still tend the bed. Every autumn I cut back the stems and tip the seed heads into my coat pocket, and when the wind comes off the fen I can hear that sunflower creaking like a gate that wants oil. I've never told the parish what she said to me at the end. She said, Walt, the trick is to let a thing finish. So I let her finish.