Traditional colour tattoo of a woman with dark wavy hair holding a skull, framed by red roses, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman, skull and roses on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with dark wavy hair and heavy eye makeup holds a skull against her chest, with a red rose tucked in her hair and more red roses around the skull. Bold black outlines and flat solid fills in red, green, yellow and grey give it a classic traditional look. The design wraps around the upper arm and sits against a white sleeve and a dark poster backdrop.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis would not let me touch the skull with the spade. I had been turning the bed under the south wall to take new rose stock, and the blade struck something hard that rang like a dropped pan. It was a brow, then a jaw, grinning sideways out of the clay as if it had been waiting for someone rude enough to dig it up.

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She came down the path in her green apron with a coil of old bell-rope looped over one wrist and knelt in the wet grass without a word. Her lashes were black with kohl, and she lifted the skull into the crook of her arm and held it against her chest, the way you might hold a sleeping cat. Vicar's wife, she said at last, 1851. She grew the crimson damasks, and I think she resents us for it still.

We buried her again under the damask bush, rope and all, and Mrs Hollis tucked a red bloom behind her ear before she went in to put the kettle on. That summer the bed bloomed twice as thick as any other on the estate. The village blamed the clay. Mrs Hollis said nothing, only cut a fresh rose each morning and wore it in her hair.

The autumn she died, I found the rope coiled on the bench by the wall, with a single red rose laid across it, still wet with dew. I left them both where they lay. Some things in a garden are kept, and some are simply given back.

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