Drawn tattoo design of a shaded grey skull with two red roses and green leaves, with red drips running down the left side, on a tan background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with red roses and dripping blood

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A coloured drawing of a human skull shaded in grey and black, with a red rose at the upper left and a second rose at the lower right, each with green leaves. Red liquid drips down from the left rose along the side of the skull. The soft, blended shading gives the skull volume against a plain tan paper background, and the composition is centred with the roses framing the skull.

Neo-trad Skull Rose Leaves Blood Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, the fourteenth of March. Father says the damp has got into the lower glasshouse again and I am not to go digging in the old bed by the wall where the Dutch roses failed. I went anyway. The spade turned up a skull the colour of weak tea, and it sat grinning at me in the clay as if it had been waiting since the last gardener left.

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Mr Ottley from the parish came up with his bag of lime and went quite white. He said the churchyard had been moved in the year of the great flood and a few stragglers were never accounted for. He wanted the thing buried again before supper. I asked him to wait until the roses were in, because we have an order for two hundred Crimson Glories due Friday and that bed is the only one with good drainage. He thought I had gone soft in the head. Perhaps I have.

I set the first cutting against the left temple, where the bone is thinnest, and tied it to the wire with a strip of my petticoat. By evening the thorns had pricked the stem and a red bead had run down the cheekbone and kept running. The second rose opened by the jaw without any help from me, and its leaves unfurled green along the chin. I did not sleep. In the morning the drip had reached the clay, and the earth beneath the skull was dark as a bruise.

Father has entered the skull in the ledger under sundries. Beneath it, in his small square hand, he has written: Bloom good this year, no charge.