Black and grey realism tattoo on skin showing two facing skulls, a skeletal hand, three butterflies, a rose and swirling smoke.

Two skulls, butterflies and rose in black and grey

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

Two skulls face each other across the centre of the design, with a skeletal hand reaching up on the left and a draped veil behind the right-hand skull. Three butterflies and a rose are placed around the skulls, with wispy smoke and scrolling swirls filling the gaps. The work is rendered in black and grey with soft shading and fine hatching, and the composition spreads across a broad, curved area of skin.

Realism Skull Skeleton hand Butterfly Rose Veil Smoke Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterflies came down off the hedgerow before Ada had finished pinning the veil, which her mother said was a bad sign and her grandmother said was the best one going. Ada had laid out eleven people in the forest village of Hollin End that winter, and she knew the look of a visitor who had no intention of leaving with his hat in his hand.

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He waited at the lychgate each dusk, bones pale against the yews, smoke curling from his ribs where the charcoal burners had lit their kilns too early. "You are the one who washes them," he said, as if she were a clerk who had miscounted. "I have come for a wife who knows the weight of a body."

She didn't answer straight away. She took a rose from the jar on the sill, the last of the summer stock, and tucked its stem into the lace. "Walk the lane with me to the mill," she said. "If I'm still wearing this when the wheel stops, you can have the first dance."

They walked. Smoke from the kilns thickened into a grey veil over the river, and the butterflies lifted from the hedge in a slow spiral. At the mill she turned, and the rose had gone brown at the edges. "Not yet," she said. He laughed, a dry sound like kindling, and lifted her hand to the hollow where his mouth had been, and the butterflies settled on the lace between them.