Greyscale pencil drawing of a winged skull above four shaded roses and leaves, drawn as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged skull with roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A winged human skull sits at the centre, with feathered wings spreading out on either side and leaves tucked behind them. Four roses line the lower edge, with dark hatched shading and fine outlines. The design is drawn in black and grey on a pale background, with the subject centred and filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Skull Wing Rose Leaves Feather

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, Eddie, it's the only one that works. Right. You want the Whitby boat, the one they called the Corlinda, and you want the skull that came up in her net the winter of the big blow. Nobody's told you that one straight because the men who saw it are dead or drinking in Scarborough now, so you'll take it from me.

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Her skipper was a man called Hollis Rudd, and he hauled up a skull in a cod trawl, clean as a bell, the crown split like a cracked cup. Fool that he was, he kept it. Set it on the wheelhouse sill with a jam jar of wild roses picked off the harbour wall, the pink ones that grow in the sand, and he swore the wind came in through its eyes and hummed a tune he knew from his mother.

Three nights after, the Corlinda went out past the Carr and the sea got up under her like a bull. Rudd lashed the wheel and sang at that skull the way you'd sing to a dog to keep it still. Come morning the net was full of gulls, every one with its wings folded on its back and not a fish among them. Half the crew said the gulls had come to bury him. The other half said they'd come for the roses.

Here's the bit they skip in the pub. Rudd's wife planted those roses on the grave of the boy he'd lost off that very deck. The skull was never a stranger's. He'd been bringing the boy home all along, the only way a father knows how. I'll not say what I think of that. The sea knows the answer, and so does your mother, Eddie, so shift that lamp and let me get to the tea.