Realistic colour tattoo of a skull wreathed in orange and red roses, pink blossoms and a pale butterfly, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with roses and butterfly on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A human skull is framed by orange and red roses, pink blossoms, a purple flower and a pale blue and green butterfly. The skull and petals are rendered with smooth, detailed shading that gives them a three-dimensional look. Vivid colour dominates against a dark, soft background that fades into the surrounding skin.

Realism Botanical Forearm Skull Rose Flower Butterfly Blossom

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughs twice before it catches, and you are already halfway up the ladder with a tin of vermilion balanced on your hip, because Mr Gorse wants the gondola finished before the lights come on at dusk. He stands below with his hands in his coat pockets and tells you the skull stays. Everyone on the circuit knows the skull. Nobody has ever paid to have it taken off.

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His father painted it in 1958, grinning out from the middle of the wagon board, and the roses came later from a girl who worked the candyfloss stall one summer. Her name was Ada, Gorse says, and she mixed her reds with a dab of orange so the petals looked lit from the side. You try it on a scrap of board and it works. The purple bloom goes in, then the pink blossoms tumbling down past the jaw, and last of all the butterfly, pale blue and green, perched on the orange rose as if it has only just decided to stay.

When you climb down, Gorse is standing very still in front of the board. He doesn't say anything for so long that you start to wipe your brushes. Then he tells you Ada painted that butterfly herself, the last thing she did before she left with a travelling juggler and never sent word back. He has kept the gondola on the road every season since, he says, so the old wheel would have something to carry her colours round the country.

At dusk the lights blink on one string at a time. The roses catch the bulbs first, then the blossoms, and the skull looks out between them with its usual patience. The wheel turns slowly, and the butterfly lifts a little on every pass, as if it means to go somewhere and never quite does.