Colour neo-trad tattoo of a sugar skull with pink flowers and green leaves on the upper thigh.

Colourful sugar skull with pink flowers on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull with heart-shaped eye sockets, decorated with swirls, dots and flowers, sits at the centre of the design. Pink blooms and green leaves wrap around the skull and extend to the edges of the frame. Bold dark outlines define the shapes, and the fills use bright pink, orange, yellow, purple and green with soft shading.

Neo-trad Thigh Sugar skull Skull Flower Leaves Heart Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dahlias came up late that year, after the frost had finished off my sweet peas, and Auntie Lupe stood at the back gate with her arms folded and told me the soil had been sulking. She had come over from Peckham with a tin of sugar skulls wrapped in greaseproof paper, the ones she made every October, and she set one on the fence post like a lookout while we worked.

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We planted the bed along the fence, pink dahlias at the back and a border of marigolds tucked in front, the orange ones her mother had grown in Oaxaca and posted to her in a padded envelope thirty years ago. I asked why the skulls always smiled so wide. She laughed and said a skull that frowned had clearly been doing its own accounts, and that the flowers were there so the dead had something pleasant to look at while they visited.

The hearts in the eye sockets were for the ones who had gone on ahead, she said, and you painted them so nobody mistook the empty place for a door. I thought about Dad's handwriting on the seed packet I had kept in my shed tin for eleven years, a single word I had never understood: Dahlia, Mixed. Nothing else.

When the last marigold was in, I shook the packet over the bare patch by the gate. Lupe pressed the skull into the soil at the foot of the post, the heart sockets facing the house, and said that was it, the garden was properly introduced now. By June the whole bed was lit up pink and gold, and the skull grinned at the kitchen window as though it had always known exactly what Dad would have wanted.