Pencil-style tattoo design of a shaded skull wearing a thorned vine crown, with a ribbon and rose below, framed by coloured rose and thorn corner ornaments.

Skull with thorn crown and rose

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A drawn design showing a shaded human skull wearing a crown of thorny vine, with a curling ribbon wrapping beneath the jaw and a rose with leaves at the lower right. The skull and rose are rendered in fine greyscale pencil-style shading with soft gradients on a pale background. Four coloured ornaments of roses, leaves and thorny vines sit in the corners as a decorative border.

Realism Botanical Skull Thorn Rose Ribbon Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sexton on Skerrow had been told to leave the old wall alone, so Hannah Dunn left it, though the wild rose had worked its way into the stones and would not be kept out. Every June it flowered on the north side, pale and thorny, and every June somebody complained about the petals drifting into the font.

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The skull turned up in February, after a gale took the top off the dune below the kirk. Hannah carried it up in a fish box, sure it was a seal's or a ewe's, but the brow was too high and the back teeth were still set in the jaw. Old Tam Affleck said it had come off the wreck of the Margaret Lowe in his grandfather's time, when the sea had given up a dozen men at once and the parish had buried them without names. Nobody on the island wanted it sent to the mainland to be looked at by strangers with clipboards.

So Hannah cut a length of rose cane from the wall, bound it round the bone like a crown, and knotted a strip of her mother's blue ribbon beneath the jaw where the hinge had rotted through. She dug a hole under the bush, set the skull in it with the ribbon trailing out over the earth, and filled it in with her boot heels, the way her mother had taught her to settle a grave.

In June the rose came out heavier than anyone could remember, and its petals fell over the stone like a fold of cloth. The vicar, who had counted the petals in his font for six summers, never once asked why the bush on that wall grew so thick, and Hannah never told him.