Skull tattoos are very versatile tattoo designs, and a popular skull tattoo design incorporates both skulls and roses. Because skulls and roses evoke very different emotions, itâs not uncommon for skull and rose tattoo meanings to be misinterpreted. The most common skull and rose tattoo meaning accommodates the most popular meanings of both skull tattoos and rose tattoos, representing the contrast between life and death or beauty and decay.
Anti-mimesis is a philosophical position that holds the direct opposite of Aristotelian mimesis. Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
*This essay is excerpted from July 4, 1826: Explaining the Same-Day Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (and What Could This Mean for Bioethics?) in Margaret P. Battin, Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die (Oxford University Press, 2005), 175-185, reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.