Pen drawing of a skull surrounded by ornate scrolls and leaves, drawn as a tattoo design on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with ornate scrollwork design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink pen drawing of a human skull with its eye sockets and teeth shaded by hatching. The skull is framed by dense, flowing filigree scrolls and acanthus-like leaves that extend down the lower half of the sheet. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading in the skull and leaves, and the design is shown in black ink on cream paper with no colour.

Skull Scrollwork Leaves Filigree Sketch Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and cold sausage rolls, and Carol Pryce had been standing by the raffle table for twenty minutes before she noticed the drawing. It was pinned to the corkboard between a photograph of the 1987 netball team and a typed list of the year groups who had gone, which was longer than anybody wanted to read aloud. A skull in black ink on cream card, its eye sockets shaded so deep they looked wet, and all around it a crowd of scrolls and curling leaves growing faster than the skull could decay.

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She knew the hand before she knew the name. Gareth Doyle had sat at the back of Mr Hartley's biology room, drawing on the inside covers of his exercise books while the rest of them pinned frogs open on wax trays. Mr Hartley had confiscated every one, and then, in the last week before the summer exams, had quietly handed them back with a single line in red biro: Keep at it. Nobody had seen Gareth draw after that. He had gone to work at the cement yard in Bolton, or so the rumour went.

"Is that yours?" she asked the woman tidying the tombola. The woman shrugged. "Found it at the bottom of the coat cupboard. Somebody's brother brought it in." Carol lifted the card off its pin and turned it over. On the back, in pencil so faint she had to tilt it towards the strip lights, someone had written: For Hartley, who was wrong about the frogs.

She laughed out loud, and a man at the bar turned round to look. Carol pinned the card back in its place, then went to find a pen from the bag by her chair. Under the skull, in the bottom margin where the scrolls ran out, she wrote her own name and the year, small and neat, so that whoever stood here next would know that somebody had stopped and looked.