Traditional-style flash design of a sugar skull woman with flowers in her hair, a COSTURERA banner, scissors and a spool of blue thread, drawn in cross-stitch chart form.

Costurera sugar skull with sewing kit

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A stylised woman with a sugar skull face, red and yellow flowers in her hair, sits beside a banner reading COSTURERA. Around her are a pair of scissors, a blue thread line and a yellow spool or cushion, with scrolling green and blue ornament. Bold dark outlines and flat solid fills in red, yellow, blue and cream give it a traditional flash look, shown here as a pixelated cross-stitch grid on a tan background.

Traditional Sugar skull Woman Banner Lettering Scissors Thread Spool Flower Sewing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thread ran out twice before Consuelo finished the blue hem, and twice she knotted the end around her little finger and kept sewing, because the dead do not wait on a seamstress to fetch more cotton from the market. Her scissors had been her mother's, their handles worn pale where the thumb went. Every October the village brought her its best dresses from the chests kept at the edge of the pine wood, and every year she made them look as if no one had ever worn them.

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This year the dress belonged to Teodora Ruiz, who had buried her husband in March and wanted him to see her dance. Consuelo sewed the red flowers on by lamplight, one stitch for each year they had been married, and the yellow spool beside her grew smaller as the night went on. Old Marta from the bakery came by with bread and sat on the step, talking about the rain, while the needle clicked against the thimble.

When the last petal was fastened, Consuelo held the hem to the light and saw that the blue thread matched the ribbon Teodora had worn at her wedding. She had not meant it that way. The dress hung on the hook by the door like a woman waiting to be called.

On the night of the festival Teodora came to the door herself, laughing, and asked for her dress. Consuelo wrapped it in brown paper and said nothing about the thread. Some stitches, she thought, are better left where only the sewing can find them.