Black and grey dotwork drawing of a skull with a pompadour hairstyle, framed by lilies, roses and buds, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Skull with pompadour and lilies

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A skull wearing a swept-back pompadour sits at the top of the composition, with lilies, a rose and small buds arranged across its lower jaw and sides. The skull is built from fine linework for the hair and flowers, with stippled dotwork shading on the bone and a dark, solid area inside the eye sockets and nasal cavity. The drawing is black ink on a plain white background, with a symmetrical layout that tapers to a trailing stem at the bottom.

Dotwork Botanical Skull Lily Flower Rose Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the lilies on the piano lid when the band packs up, six stems wrapped in brown paper and still beaded with water from the florist on Cable Street. Nobody at the Palais Majestic will admit to buying them. Mr Pardoe, who has run the hall since before the war, only says the place smelt like a funeral parlour for a fortnight the last time someone left flowers on his stage, and then he tells you to sweep up the petals before the Saturday crowd.

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Your job is the cloakroom, which means you watch everyone leave. Hats, headscarves, a rain-spotted trilby with a split in its band. Lenny Hask always comes for his coat last. He combs his hair flat in the mirror by the fire door, lifting it into a high, glossy wave that he says took him three years to master, and when he sees you he lifts two fingers off his cap without looking, the way a man does to a bus conductor he has known for ages.

Tonight he doesn't come. Ruth, the fiddle player, stops at the rack with his coat over her arm and says he went to the station at ten with a small case and a face like thunder. She hands you the ticket he left, number forty seven, pinned to a scrap of paper that reads only: Keep the flowers. Tell Pardoe they're from me.

You put the lilies in a jam jar on the cloakroom ledge, where the stems open slowly through the evening. By the last waltz the pollen has dusted the brass counter and the ticket, a fine orange smudge, and you leave it there because it is the only thing in the building that looks like it has somewhere to go.