Pencil drawing of a neo-traditional skull surrounded by roses, a crossbone and spider webs, designed as a tattoo.

Skull with roses and crossbones drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a cartoon-style skull with a crossbone at the top left and a bone at the right, set among layered roses and leaves. Spider webs fill the background on both sides, and the skull has solid shading in the eye sockets and along the jaw. The image is monochrome, with the composition arranged in a rounded, symmetrical cluster.

Neo-trad Traditional Skull Rose Bone Crossbones Spider web Leaves

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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

It rained on the Thursday market at Harrowgate the way it always did, straight down and then sideways, and Mabel Dunn kept her roses under a tarpaulin that sagged every time the wind came round the church corner. Nobody bought roses in the wet. She sold them cheap to the boys who came in out of the weather, and she let the old men stand under her awning for nothing.

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She had bought the skull from the knacker's yard for a shilling, because it grinned at her from the sack. It had a crack across the brow and one eye hole stained dark, as if it had been looking at something for a very long time. Each evening she set it on an upturned crate and heaped the roses around it, and the spiders that lived in the iron railings strung their webs between the crossed bones on her pole. Mabel never swept them away.

One Thursday a man in a long grey coat came to collect the stall fee. He had no umbrella and his collar was soaked through. He looked at the skull a while and said he would give two pounds for it. Mabel said it was not for sale. He said the rain would ruin her stock. She said the skull would keep it dry. He laughed and reached for the bone at the side of the crate, and the webs came down off the pole in one soft sheet, settling over his shoulders and his hair and the grey wool of his coat until he could not lift his arms.

He paid the fee in full the next week, in coins he counted out slowly, and never came back to Harrowgate. The rain stopped that afternoon, and the roses on Mabel's stall were still in bloom when the sun came out, though it was November. The skull had a new crack in its jaw, shaped exactly like a sixpence.