Pencil sketch of a open-jawed skull framed by roses and sprigs of leaves, drawn as a tattoo design in black and grey with no body part shown.

Skull with roses and foliage pencil sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a human skull with its jaw open, surrounded by three roses and sprigs of leaves and berries. The skull is rendered with soft graded shading and fine hatched lines, while the roses use bold outlines and layered petals. The image is black and grey on a plain pale background, with the design arranged in a compact, balanced composition.

Botanical Skull Rose Foliage Leaves Berry Sprig Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third night the snow had buried the Hollin Gate to its windowsills, and the landlady had run out of patience with guests asking when the road would open. You were the only one still laughing at her stories. The others had gone up to bed with their candles, but you stayed by the fire with the skull on the mantel, the one the village swore had belonged to a fiddler drowned in the millrace. Its jaw hung open as if it were halfway through a joke, and someone had wedged three wild roses into the gap where its cheek had once been.

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Mrs Teague came back with a tray of mulled cider and set it down without looking at you. "He laughed at the wrong things, that fiddler," she said. "Laughed at the tithe man, laughed at the minister's wife and her hat. The parish said his mouth was full of hornets, so they wired his jaw shut. Next morning the wire lay on the flagstones and the roses had come up through the boards."

You asked what the roses had to do with it. She picked a thorn from her thumb and said they only grew where somebody was still laughing in a room with the dead. Then she took her lamp and went down to the cold kitchen, and you heard the back door latch behind her.

You drank the cider, which had gone lukewarm, and watched the skull's jaw sit a little wider than it had before. When the thaw came, the drovers would find a fiddle on the stairs with its strings still humming, and three roses pressed flat in the snow outside your door, with no footprints leading away from them.