Colour neo-traditional sugar skull tattoo in green and blue with red and orange flowers and blue roses, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful sugar skull with roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A green and blue sugar skull with patterned red, orange and white flowers in the eye sockets and forehead, sits above a cluster of blue roses and a pink lotus-like flower. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the design, with light shading on the skull. The tattoo is centred on the skin, with the edges of the leg visible at the sides.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower Lotus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomás, the green paint you sent from Bristol is the wrong green, too cold for a skull that has to look as if it has been out in the sun. I have mixed it with yellow until it looks like new leaves, and still Señora Ruiz says it needs more blue. So I have put the blue on the cheeks and the forehead, where the light falls, and left the eyes for last, as Papá taught us.

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The eyes are the hard part. Each socket gets a flower, red petals outlined so black the brush goes dry in the middle of a stroke. I did the first ones with my hand shaking because the stall opens at nine and it was past three when I started. Lupe came round with coffee and sat on the step watching, saying nothing, which is how I know she thinks I am doing well. She used to tell me my lines wandered like goats.

Underneath the skull I painted the roses, three of them, blue as the sea off Veracruz, which neither of us has ever seen except in the calendar from the bakery. Between them a pink flower opens like a lotus that has wandered a long way from any pond. Tomorrow the skulls go on the table in the square, and the customers will buy them for their dead and for their own jokes about death. I kept one back.

I have put it in the box with your letters. Do not open it until the marigolds are gone from the market, and do not tell Mamá, who will want it for the altar. Write back and tell me the English word for lotus, because the man at the shop said it has a name I have forgotten. Your loving sister, Carmen.