Stacked skulls with roses and ribbon banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design of four skulls stacked one above another, with a rose tucked beside several of them and a curling ribbon banner at the top and bottom. The linework is bold and clean, with hatching and solid black areas in the eye sockets and shading on the skull surfaces. It is rendered entirely in black ink and grey tones on a plain white background.

Traditional Skull Rose Ribbon Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cactus, it bites worse than the sun. You want to know about the four skulls on the Harrow Wells road? Everyone has heard of them and nobody has looked close. Abel Fenner stacked them there the summer his wife left on the mail coach. Four skulls, one on top of the other, like a man building a tower to see how high grief will go before it topples.

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He gathered them from the wash below the ridge, where the flash floods leave their leavings. Each one got a rose wedged beside it, because Abel said roses were the only thing out here that grew without asking for water. He tied a ribbon banner off the top skull and another off the bottom, so anyone passing would think the thing was a message and stop to read it. The wind read it instead, and wore the ribbons into curls.

Travellers stopped anyway. A surveyor with a brass theodolite once spent an afternoon sketching the stack, and he swore the lowest skull was grinning wider than the rest. Abel laughed when he heard that. He said the bottom one had always been the happiest, having nothing left to carry.

Come morning the surveyor found the tower standing, and a single fresh rose laid at the foot of it, its petals still wet with dew. Nobody on that road ever learned whose hand had placed it. I have told this tale a hundred times, and every time I end it there, because the rose is the part that keeps on growing.