Black and grey flash design of skulls among roses and thorned vines on a textured grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skulls and roses on thorned vines

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of several skulls set among full-blown roses, with thin stems, thorns and serrated leaves climbing through the composition. The linework is fine and detailed, with cross-hatched shading that gives the skulls and petals volume. The image is entirely black and grey on a mottled grey backdrop, with no colour ink.

Botanical Skull Rose Vine Thorn Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose hedge along the lower field had not been pruned since my father's funeral, and by the second week of January it had swallowed the drystone wall whole. I went at it with secateurs in the dark before the milking, cutting the canes back to where they went grey and then green, and every stem came with a thorn that found the skin of my wrists through two pairs of gloves.

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Under the oldest bush, where the ground dips to the beck, there were three skulls. I don't mean bones lying in the leaf litter. They were the heads of roses, full-blown and black with frost, and when the light came up over Harrow Fell I saw that the petals had grown around something round and hollow in the centre, like a bloom that had decided to keep its own memory. Mam said her grandmother planted them to keep the foxes off. Nobody dug them out.

The vine wound up the gatepost and across the lintel, and I followed it with the shears until my fingers stopped answering. Halfway up, a knot of canes had locked round a rusted gate chain. I cut through it and the whole tangle came down on me at once, a rattle of dead leaves and cold thorns. I lay in the mud looking up, and the skull roses hung over me, watching like they had all the time in the world.

When I got up, the gate was free and the chain lay in the grass. I left the three oldest bushes standing, tied a strip of baler twine round the nearest stem, and went in to my tea. Next morning the frost had furred every petal white, and the twine had come loose and lay coiled at the base of the bush, as if something had untied it and gone on its way.