Greyscale realistic drawing of a woman with closed eyes, a skull and roses above her head and a jawbone at her chin, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with skull and roses design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed greyscale drawing of a woman with her eyes closed and head tilted back, with a human skull resting on top of her head and two large roses on the left. A curved jawbone rests beneath her chin at the lower edge of the image. The soft airbrush-style shading and fine hair strands give the piece a realistic, painterly finish against a plain grey background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marian,

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The roses on the balcony have come back, though I swear I cut the lot of them down on Tuesday and put them in the bin with the Christmas tree. Mr Okafor from flat 14 says it's the damp off the concrete that brings them up, and I didn't argue with him. You know me. I'd rather have something stubborn growing out there than nothing at all.

I've been going through Dad's boxes in the cupboard under the stairs, the ones nobody could face after the funeral. There's a tin of mismatched buttons, a Sunday paper from 1987 folded around a bread knife, and at the bottom a carved wooden skull no bigger than a pear. The teeth are painted yellow and one of them has come loose. Taped to the underside was a Woolworths bag with four words in his square capitals: FOR THE ONE WHO FINISHES.

I have no idea what he meant. Finishes what? The lasagne? The argument about the gas meter that ran from 1994 until he died? I sat on the stairs with it in my lap for an hour, listening to the lift grind up and down the shaft like it was looking for someone. Then I went out and found the old deer jaw Uncle Stan left in the coal shed, the one we were never allowed to touch, and I took it to the sink and scrubbed the dirt off it with a nail brush.

I've set the skull on the windowsill between the roses and the jaw propped against the glass. It looks ridiculous, like a shelf display in a shop that's gone under. The roses don't seem to mind. Come Saturday and bring the good scissors. Between us we might finish whatever it is he started.

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