Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a skull with blossoming flowers and leaves growing from its crown, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull with a cracked, open jaw sits at the base of the design, and flowers with leaves and buds grow up and out from the top of the cranium. The skull is shaded with stippled dots and the flowers and leaves use solid black fill with fine outlines. The design is in black and grey ink and is centred on the limb against a pale background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Skull Flower Leaves Bud Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came in on the spring tides, wedged in a wrack of kelp below the Kirk Rocks, and Ishbel Mackay carried it up the machair in a fish box because nobody else on Inchcolm would touch it. She scrubbed it with vinegar and set it on the kitchen windowsill, where the light came through the cracked jaw and laid a bar of brightness across the table.

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The first winter she left it alone. In April she noticed a dark green shoot pushing from the crown where the seams had split, and by June there were three stems, leaves the shape of mussel shells, and buds like closed fists. Her neighbour Donald came by for eggs, looked at the sill, and asked whether she had gone soft in the head since her sister died. "It's feverfew," she said. "It likes poor ground."

Donald did not come back for a week. When he did, he brought his own bad news: the ferry had been cancelled, the locum had gone home, and his wife was poorly in the back bedroom. He stood at the sill a long time, his cap turning in his hands. Ishbel cut a single flower, small and white-eyed, and pressed it into his palm without a word.

By August the stems had spilled over the jaw and down the sill in a dark tangle, and the whole island knew to knock on Ishbel's door when they needed a cutting for a bad chest or a sleepless child. She never told them where the skull had come from. She only said it had been given to her, and that she had never once been asked to explain a gift.