Pencil drawing of two skulls meeting within an ornate heart-shaped frame with scrollwork, shaded in black and grey on a sepia background.

Two skulls within an ornate heart

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two human skulls facing each other, their brows nearly touching, set inside a heart-shaped frame. The frame is decorated with scrolls, leaf-like acanthus ornament and a central bead motif, which are shaded with strong contrast. The work is rendered in pencil or graphite in black and grey tones on a warm, aged paper background.

Neo-trad Skull Heart Scrollwork Ornament Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the tin when the frost finally lets go of the walled garden at Hollin Ferry, your trowel turning up the roots of the old damson. It is a biscuit tin with its lid rusted shut, and it rattles as if it has teeth in it. Teague, the gardener before you, never once looked up from his box hedges in eleven years, and he left no note, only a square of card with the word keep pencilled on it.

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Inside, wrapped in a linen shirt gone the colour of weak tea, are two skulls. They are not white but the yellow of old piano keys, their cheekbones cracked like glazed crockery. Someone has packed them nose to nose, brow to brow, the way people lie down when they have nothing left to say. You sit back on your heels. The wind moves the espaliered pears against the brick, and somewhere the library clock strikes eleven.

You carry the tin up to the house expecting a scolding. Mrs Ashby is in her wing chair with a pot of Earl Grey gone cold beside her. She studies the pair for a long time, then asks you to unfold the shirt, and you see the initials stitched in its hem, T.A. and E.A. "Teague wanted them kept facing," she says. "Ellen wouldn't have them parted, and nor would he." She does not say what happened to Ellen, and you do not ask.

That afternoon you bury the tin under the damson, the skulls still wrapped and still facing, and you lay a sprig of lavender across the lid. By April the lavender has rooted through the rusted seam, and that bed is the only one in the garden where nothing needs pruning.