Black ink line drawing of a woman with long dark hair, eyes closed, leaning in to kiss a skull held in her hand, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman kissing a skull, line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A woman with long dark hair and closed eyes leans in towards a skull, which she holds up with one hand under its jaw. The image uses bold, even black linework with solid areas of black for the hair and the skull's eye socket, with no shading or greys. The composition is centred on white space, with the figure's bare shoulders and upper chest cropped at the lower edge.

Woman Skull Hair Kiss Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find it in the bed behind the glasshouse, where the spade has turned up more than the leeks ever did. The skull is the colour of old piano keys and it sits in the clay as though it has been waiting for someone to ask its name. Your grandmother, who kept the walled garden at Hollin Lodge for forty-one years, would have called it untidy to leave lying in the rain. You carry it up the gravel path in both hands, past the runner beans, and set it on the potting bench beside the seed trays.

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The housekeeper's boy comes round with the post and laughs when he sees it, then dares you. He says you wouldn't. You tell him the dead have had worse company than a gardener's hands, and that the only thing worth fearing is a man who doesn't know how to hold a spade. You lift the skull under its jaw, the way you'd cradle a seedling by the root, and lean in. Its teeth are cold and there is lime dust on its brow. You kiss it anyway, eyes shut, and the boy goes white and runs for the gate.

Nothing happens, which is the disappointing part. Nothing creaks and no bell rings in the chapel. Only the wind moves through the yew hedge and a robin lands on the wall to watch you. You feel foolish and oddly steady, as if you have settled a debt nobody ever wrote down. Later you wash the skull under the outside tap, wrap it in a flannel, and carry it back to the bed, where you dig a hole exactly the depth of the hand that found it.

By August the foxgloves have closed over the spot, purple bells nodding above it like a row of very polite mourners. You never told anyone whose skull it was, or whether anyone had kissed it before you. Each morning the robin still comes to the wall to see whether you are coming out to work.