Engraved-style skull with red roses, blue flowers and a songbird on a woman's upper arm, shown in a vintage illustration style.

Skull with roses and bird on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed skull in black linework and grey shading sits on the upper arm, with a crown of red roses, small blue flowers and green leaves across the top of the skull. A bird with orange and teal plumage perches above the flowers on the left. The colour is concentrated in the flowers and bird, while the skull remains monochrome against a pale skin tone and a white lace top in the background.

Traditional Upper arm Skull Rose Bird Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheelbarrow tipped on the gravel path and the skull rolled out of the leaf mould and came to rest against your boot, grinning up with the same patience it had shown the gardeners for forty years. Mrs Hollis wanted it gone before the Easter open day. She said it had belonged to the doctor who lived in the west wing, and that nobody had thought to bury it with him.

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You did not want it gone. You carried it to the potting shed, rinsed the dirt from its teeth with a jug of rainwater, and set it on the windowsill where the light came through the cracked glass. By the end of the week someone had pushed a red rose cutting into the crown, into the seam where the bone had split, and it had taken. Blue flowers from the old hedge kept appearing among the leaves, though nobody admitted to planting them.

The bird arrived in June. It was a small thing, orange at the breast and teal along the wing, and it perched on the skull's brow every morning while you hosed the cold frames, cocking its head as though it was reading the labels pinned to the shelf. Mrs Hollis came down one afternoon, saw it there, and said nothing for so long that you thought she would order you to sweep the lot onto the bonfire.

Instead she took the doctor's old ledger from her apron pocket and read you a line about a swallow that had nested in a skull on the orangery wall, and how the family had decided it was lucky. Then she asked whether the roses would be ready for the fête. You said they would. When she went back up the path, the bird lifted off the windowsill and followed her as far as the gate.