Black and grey sleeve tattoo on a woman's arm showing a sugar skull portrait, lilies, roses and scrolling vines across the upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey sugar skull and lily sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeve of tattoos covers the upper arm and forearm, with a sugar skull style female portrait at the upper arm and shaded lilies, roses and scrolling ornamental vines down the forearm. The work uses fine shading and soft grey gradients with bold black linework, and the composition wraps around the arm with the portrait and flowers flowing into one another. The photo is taken indoors against a white door frame, with only the lower face and lips of the wearer visible.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Forearm Sugar skull Portrait Woman Lily Rose Scroll Vine Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop picking at the wax. You want to hear about the widow who painted her husband's face on the sugar, or you want to go back to the psalms? Good. Then listen, because I will not tell it twice and my knees will not let me stand to tell it again.

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There was a woman in the valley below this wall called Constanza, who made sugar skulls for the feast of the dead. Every October she boiled the sugar with lime blossom and poured it into clay moulds, and every one of them grinned at the village like a bride who knows the joke. Her husband Tomás had been a carter who drove his mule down to the coast and never drove back. She did not make his skull. She said she would not sweeten a man who had left her with the washing.

Then the spring after, the lilies came up white through the rubble of the old chapel wall, more of them than anyone had planted. Constanza cut them and carried them up the road in her apron. She knelt at the grave with a bucket of wet clay, and with her thumbs and a bone knife she shaped not a skull but a face, her own, grinning and crowned in lilies, with a scroll of vine curling from the brow. The priest said it was blasphemy. The old women said it was the best likeness of a living woman they had ever seen.

And here is the end, so mind it. On the morning of the feast the grave was bare, the clay gone, and the lilies were pressed into the mule's tracks all the way down to the sea. Tomás came up the road that noon, sunburnt and sheepish, with a brass mule-bell in his fist, and she hit him with the wet cloth for a full minute before she let him in.