Pencil and ink line drawings of three perfume bottles with atomiser bulbs and tassels on a sketchbook page, one bottle with a skull label washed in pink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three perfume bottle designs in a sketchbook

Mixed · Flash

Three perfume bottle designs are drawn in black ink on a sketchbook page, each with a bulb atomiser and a hanging tassel. The left bottle has a faceted body with a small skull inside an oval label, lightly washed in pink, while the other two bottles have patterned or scalloped bodies. The clean, even linework and simple shading suit a flash sheet of separate tattoo designs.

Tassel Skull Bottle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate from Lowestoft arrived on a Tuesday, three weeks late and smelling faintly of violets, which Mr Hollis took as a bad sign. Inside, wrapped in cotton waste, were forty bulb atomisers with their tassels still knotted, and a note in a hand that leaned backwards as if it wanted to leave the room. "Faceted, if you please, and the poison label in the usual oval. Nobody buys a thing they cannot be frightened of."

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Hollis had been stippling skulls onto paper labels since he was an apprentice in Bristol, and he did not think much of the instruction. He cut the ovals anyway, dipped a fine brush in rose madder and thinned it with water until each skull blushed the colour of a cheek after a cold walk. Ada, who kept the books, watched him do all forty and said nothing until the last one had dried.

"She'll sell them to the wrong sort of woman," she said at last. "The kind who wants a little danger on her dressing table and no real harm in the bottle."

"Then they'll be honest about it," Hollis said, and went back to his scalloped bodies, because the faceted ones had taken the morning.

The Lowestoft order was never collected. Ada sent the crate on to Margate and charged the carriage to a Mrs Marlow whom nobody in either town could find. One bottle stayed on the shelf by the shop window, its tassel dusted grey, its little skull catching the lamplight each evening as the trams went past. Hollis still has it. He filled it with lavender water the winter Ada died, and when he holds it to the light the skull looks less like a warning than a joke that has finally been let in on itself.