Colour tattoo of a shaded skull with pink lilies, a daisy and green vines on the upper back, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with pink lilies and daisy on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A skull is the central subject, with a blue scrolled ornament across its crown and two pink lilies, one at the upper right and one at the lower left. A white daisy with a yellow centre sits over one eye socket, and green vines and leaves finish the composition. The skull is shaded with soft tonal gradients, and the flowers are rendered in saturated pinks and reds against the skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Skull Lily Daisy Flower Leaves Vine Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has sealed the Hollin Pass since Tuesday, and by the third night the bar at the Dun Heron has run out of everything but the rum you were warned about. You sit where the fire throws the most heat, and Mrs Varley sets down a plate of cold mutton without asking what you want. Above the casks, in a niche cut into the stone, a skull sits with a daisy tucked into one eye socket and a crown painted the blue of a frozen sky.

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'Her husband painted that,' she says, catching your look. 'He was a sign-writer in Keighley before the mill shut. He did the skull for the lych gate every All Souls, and then for himself, when the lilies came up wrong that year. He said they looked dipped in blood.' She wipes a glass that is already clean. 'The daisy was my idea. Somebody has to put something sensible on a skull.'

Outside, the wind knocks at the shutters like a man who has lost his way. You ask why nobody has ever taken it down. She says the drovers who come through in January always offer to buy it, and she always says it's spoken for, and then she goes upstairs and comes back with a jam jar of snowmelt and a single lily stem, which she sets on the sill beside the window.

In the morning the road is clear and the sky is flat and pale. Your room is cold, but on the sill beside the lily stem lies a curl of green vine, still wet, twisted into a neat spiral as if someone had been practising the shape. You pocket it before you think better of it.