Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a cupcake with pink swirled frosting, a skull candy apple, a bat and peppermint sweets on a lower leg.

Cupcake with skull apple and cleaver

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cupcake with pink and white swirled frosting sits at the centre, flanked by a red candy apple with a skull face and a bat above. Peppermint sweets, small round candies, a heart-cut cleaver with red drips and black ornamental swirls complete the composition. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with saturated red, pink, green, blue and orange shading.

Neo-trad Calf Cupcake Frosting Skull Bat Candy Heart Blood Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer lifted the cleaver out of the box by its handle, holding it the way my mother held a wasp, and asked what I intended to do with it to a cupcake. "Cut it," I said. "The sponge is dense in the middle, you need a proper blade." He did not laugh. He turned over the candy apple next, the red one with the grinning skull on its face, then the paper bag of peppermints, then a tray of thirty-six frosted cupcakes stacked like pink ammunition.

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I had driven the van off the Calais ferry with the windows down, because the buttercream was softening in the heat, and I had told myself the whole length of the M20 that nobody searches a woman carrying cakes for a church fête. My nan's Witches' Tea starts at two o'clock in Maidstone. She has run it for forty years, and every year she asks for something with teeth in it. I had spent the night before swirling raspberry and vanilla frosting by hand, humming along to the radio, while the cleaver sat on the worktop like a guest nobody had invited.

He asked about the bat stencilled on the lid. I explained it was the emblem of the tea, and that the blood on the blade was raspberry coulis, which I accept is a choice. He sniffed the air, took one cupcake from the top of the stack, and bit into it while I watched him read the manifest. Then he peeled the sticker from the back of his clipboard and pressed it onto the paperwork with the solemnity of a man sealing a treaty.

"Everything's in order," he said, wiping a pink smear from the corner of his mouth with the back of his glove. "Tell your nan the skull is far too kind."