Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a shaded skull wrapped in a snake, with two roses and a dagger at the base.

Skull with snake and roses design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a skull with a snake coiled around it, its open jaws and forked tongue at the top of the skull. Two roses with leaves sit at the lower left and right, and a snake or dagger runs down the centre beneath the skull. The image is drawn in graphite on pale paper, with soft grey shading and fine scale texture on the snake.

Traditional Skull Snake Rose Dagger 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

Frost had sealed the yard pump again by six, and Ada Pryce broke the skin of ice with the heel of her boot before she could fill the trough. Behind her the barn door stood open on its one hinge. Her uncle had never once oiled it, and the wind tugged it back and forth like someone wanting in.

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Inside, on the tack-room wall, the pencil drawing hung where it had hung since the funeral. Uncle Walt had sketched it on the back of a feed invoice: a skull with a snake wound round its crown, two roses low on either side, and the snake's tail running down like a blade. He had meant to have it inked on his forearm at the parlour in the market town before lambing. He never got the sleeve. Ada took it down, blew the dust off the graphite, and noticed the shading was softest where the scales were, as though he had rubbed them with his thumb a hundred times.

She folded it into her coat and walked the ewes out past the frozen beck to the old thorn hedge, where Walt had buried the jam jar of pennies he saved for the work. The ground rang under the spade and her fingers went numb in the dark. When the tin came up, the pennies were green, and beneath them lay a second drawing, the roses unfinished and the dagger outlined but blank.

She didn't finish it. She pinned the first sketch to the gatepost with the blackthorn spike Walt had used for the same job every spring, and let the wind have the rest. By morning frost had furred the paper white, and the roses, for once, looked finished.