Four-panel view of a colour and grey realism sleeve on an upper arm, showing skulls with red roses and green leaves.

Skulls and red roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm in a cluster of grey shaded skulls, with several large red roses and dark green leaves filling the gaps around them. The skulls are rendered with smooth grey shading and highlights, while the roses have bold red petals with darker tonal modelling. The four panels show the same arm from different angles against a black background.

Realism Neo-trad Upper arm Skull Rose Leaf Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the sexton at Little Hadwick dug the new graves on the north side, and every spring he turned up old bones that nobody had marked. He put them in a barrow and wheeled them behind the tithe barn, where the nettles grew thick. Nobody thought much of it until the summer red roses came up on the barn wall, though nobody had planted them.

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Old Mrs Tully, who kept the post office and knew everybody's business, said the roses had come out of the barrow. She said it loudly in the queue on a Thursday, and Ada Marsh, who had buried her husband the winter before, went white and asked her to hush. But the roses kept coming. They climbed over the heap, shouldered through the nettles, and by August they were as thick as cabbages, each bloom dark as claret and heavy on its stem.

Walter Crane, the sexton, went out one evening with a fork to clear the bank, and found the skulls lying in a row, every one facing the lane as if waiting for the bus. He sat on the barrow a long while with his cap in his hands. Afterwards he said he had only meant to carry them to the charnel house, but when he tried to lift the first one, the roses had wound themselves round its jaw and he could not bring himself to tear them loose.

So the town left them be. The barn wall still blooms every June, and the children dare each other to touch the thorns. Walter kept digging the graves on the north side, and he always whistled while he worked, though nobody ever heard him stop.