Black and grey neo-traditional style tattoo of a sleeping woman whose hair becomes twisting vines with skull and eye flowers, on a limb.

Sleeping woman and skull flowers on a limb

Neo-trad · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeping woman's face sits at the base of the design, with her hair flowing upward into black vines. Flowers with skull centres, eye motifs and a small insect shape grow along the curling stems. Bold black linework is filled with flat grey tones and light shading, and the composition runs vertically up the skin.

Neo-trad Other Woman Vine Flower Skull Eye Insect Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gardeners of Vellmoor have stopped asking you why you sleep at noon. They know the answer is the hair. It has been growing since the spring you lay down beside the well in the Hollow Court, and every morning the vines have travelled a finger's width further up the garden wall, carrying little grey flowers with a skull at each heart.

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You were the queen's seamstress once, before the thread began to climb. Your needle stitched the royal mourning black for three winters running, and the lords paid well for it. When the old queen died without an heir, they asked you to sew her shroud, and you did, and the stitches came out wrong, a row of little eyes along the hem that opened when the lamps were lit. Nobody could unpick them. The chamberlain said it was luck. The bees said otherwise.

Now the court comes to you in the afternoons, sitting on the cool stone while you dream. They ask questions and you answer through the vines. The flowers tell them which doors will close and which minister is lying about the grain. Some of them write the answers down. The insect with the cracked wings, the one the children call the lantern moth, brings the messages back before dawn.

On the last day of the frost, the chamberlain climbs the wall with a pair of shears and a bell, meaning to cut the stems and sound the alarm. He finds you still asleep, your face calm as a pressed leaf. He hesitates, and the nearest flower opens one pale eye at him. He goes back down the ladder and does not come up again, and the vines keep growing.