Black and grey pencil drawing of two realistic skulls framed by roses and leaves, shown as a tattoo design sketch with no body placement.

Two skulls with roses design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of two human skulls, one above the other, with three roses and several leaves arranged around them in a diagonal composition. The skulls and petals are rendered with soft graduated shading and fine hatched linework on a pale mottled background. The image is entirely greyscale, with no colour ink.

Realism Skull Rose Leaf Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion remembered that Annie Fenwick could draw, which is why the pencil sheet passed from hand to hand by the crisps like a stolen exam paper. Tobias Gale had found it in a plastic wallet behind the sports hall, two skulls stacked like mismatched bookends with roses climbing through their eye sockets and leaves tumbling down the page. He said it was his, too quickly, and Carly from the year below laughed and said he couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler.

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I knew the hand. Annie always shaded from the top left, so the light fell the way it did through the art block window at four o'clock in February. She hatched the petals in tight curls and left a white nick on every rose where the paper had caught the lamp. Her initials were tucked into the bottom corner, small and neat, and Tobias kept his thumb over them as he turned the sheet in the light.

Annie had left the college the summer of the fire in the chemistry lab, the one nobody talked about afterwards, and she had not sent a card since. Tobias wanted the drawing back on the table so we could toast something, and I could see he had been carrying it around for years in the hope that someone would tell him whose it was.

I took the sheet while he was at the bar. In the car park, under the sodium lamp, the lower skull looked up at me with its jaw open on a joke nobody had finished. I folded it in four and slipped it inside my coat, beside the name badge I had forgotten to take off, and I did not go back in to say who had drawn it.