Black dotwork tattoo on a thigh showing wildflowers rising from an animal skull and ribcage, framed by dotted geometric lines and a circle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wildflowers and skeleton on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the outer thigh shows a branching stem of wildflowers and small blooms growing out of an animal skull and rib cage. Dotted linework and stippled shading give the skeleton and foliage texture, and a dotted circle and diamond frame surround the design. The composition is entirely black and grey on pale skin, with the wearer's shorts visible at the top edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Thigh Wildflower Flower Skull Skeleton Geometric line Dotted line Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had been dead three winters when Mared finally carried it up to the old spoil heap above Cwm Dulas. She wrapped the bones in a flour sack and kept the sack under the stairs, where her father had kept his carbide lamps, and she did not tell her brother what was in it. Nobody in the village talked about the drift mines anymore. The slate tips had gone green and the chapel roof had lost half its tiles, but the ground still gave things back if you dug at the right edge of it.

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She found the place by the dotted line of stones the men had left when they walked the seams, each one a little apart from the next, as if counting. At the tip she knelt and laid the skull on a bed of sheep's wool, then arranged the ribs beside it in the order her grandmother had taught her for hanging washing. The wind came off the Carneddau sharp enough to make her eyes run. When she looked up, a ring of thistle and campion stood in a loose circle around her, the same flowers that had crept over the pit wall the summer her father went down for the last time.

She planted what she had brought in a paper bag: a root of yarrow dug from the lane, two seed heads of ox-eye daisy, a clutch of grass that might have been anything. Then she sat back on her heels and waited, the way you wait for a kettle that has been on the hob since dawn. The fox's skull stayed a skull. The sun slid behind a shoulder of hill and the cold settled into her coat.

But when she stood to go, a single stem had already pushed up through the rib cage, pale and fine as a hair, and she thought it would come to nothing by morning and was glad of it anyway.