Line drawing design of a woman with wavy hair looking into a hand mirror that shows a skeleton, with poppy flowers below, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with skull reflection in hand mirror

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink line drawing on paper shows a woman with wavy hair and a flower in it, turned towards a hand mirror. The mirror reflects a skull and ribcage, and large poppy flowers with leaves fill the lower part of the composition. The linework uses fine outlines with hatched shading on the leaves and petals, and the image is entirely black and white.

Neo-trad Botanical Woman Mirror Skull Skeleton Reflection Poppy Flower Leaves Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, and don't touch the silver-backed glass on the landing. Mr Tallis bought it at a dead man's sale in Whitby, paid three shillings and thought himself clever. He hung it in the back bedroom, where the poppies grow thick up the cliff path below the window, and that was the first mistake, because a mirror that looks at poppies all summer starts to look back at them.

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The first morning he came down to breakfast grey as a kipper. He said he'd shaved in it and the face in the glass had been fine, handsome even, but behind that face, where his shoulders should have been, there was a ribcage, neat as a basket, and a skull sitting on it with its jaw hung open as if it were about to tell a joke. He laughed it off over his toast. Then the poppies on the sill began dropping their petals one at a time, like somebody counting out coins.

I took the mirror down myself on the Sunday and wrapped it in a dish towel. I carried it to the cellar and turned it to face the damp wall. That night I heard it knocking against the stone, tap, tap, the way a man knocks to be let out. In the morning the towel was on the floor and the glass was facing the bed, and the skull in it was smiling a little wider than before.

I've kept it on the landing since, and I tell the lodgers not to look too long. Mr Tallis left on the Tuesday with his bags packed and his collar done up to the chin, and he never once glanced at himself in the hall on his way out. Every morning now I wipe that glass myself, I make sure the poppies in the vase beneath it are fresh, and I say good morning to the bones before I say it to anyone living.