Realism and neo-traditional chest tattoo of a skull held by skeletal hands, flanked by paisley-bandana skulls and red roses.

Skulls and red roses on a chest

Realism · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A central skull is held by two skeletal hands, with a paisley-bandana skull on each side and a cropped script banner across the top. Two red roses with dark drips sit below, and the skulls are shaded in black and grey with smooth gradients. The composition fills the upper chest symmetrically, with bold contrast between the grey skulls and the saturated red flowers.

Realism Neo-trad Chest Skull Skeleton hand Rose Paisley Bandana Script

Find an artist for this

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

Mr Ansell wanted his skulls finished before the Whitsun crowds came down the front, and he wanted them looking as though they had been to a good funeral and enjoyed it. I had three weeks, a stepladder with one good leg, and a tin of red enamel that had sat in the back of the shed since the Coronation. He kept calling the centre piece the Gentleman. It was a plaster skull a lad from Ramsgate had cast, and it sat on a little velvet cushion between two pairs of bony hands he had bought off a theatre props man in Deal.

Keep reading

I painted the paisley bandanas first, because they were the part people would walk past and then turn back to look at. Teardrop shapes in black and grey, curling into each other like a rope of smoke. Mr Ansell stood at the bottom of the ladder smoking and telling me what he had seen in Blackpool in '51, a fellow who won a fortune on the wheel and then bought the wheel. I didn't believe half of it. I didn't need to. My hands knew the shape of a rose better than they knew the shape of a story.

The roses went in on the last Thursday. I did them from memory of my mother's garden, the heavy kind that dropped petals onto the path in June. The red was too bright against the grey skulls, so I thinned it with turpentine and let it run down the petals in long dark drips, the way the sea wall looked after a storm. Mr Ansell studied them a long time and said nothing, which from him was praise.

On the Monday the rain came sideways off the Channel and the booth leaked. By morning the red had run down over the velvet and onto the plaster brow of the Gentleman, and if you squinted it looked as though he had been crying. Mr Ansell said it was the best thing I had ever done. He never paid me for the roses.