Four sugar skull designs in teal, magenta, purple and green, each decorated with flowers, scrolls and hearts on a white background.

Four coloured sugar skull designs

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The image shows four symmetrical sugar skull designs arranged in a two by two grid, each with a different colour: teal, magenta, purple and olive green. Each skull has ornate floral and scroll patterns across the forehead and cheeks, with some featuring roses, heart-shaped eye sockets and spade-shaped noses. The linework is solid and uniform, with flat colour fills and no shading, set against a plain white background.

Botanical Sugar skull Skull Flower Rose Heart Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The colliery whistle had gone quiet in September, and by the first of November the Welfare had nothing left to raffle. My sister Maud came round with a roll of brown wrapping paper and the good kitchen scissors and said we were making skulls, the way the Mexican women did in the picture Dad brought home from the Navy. I told her the dead had had enough of us. She said that was exactly why they should be made pretty.

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We folded the paper in four and drew half a face on one side, so the cut-out would come out even. Maud did the scrolls with a pencil that had been sharpened with a bread knife. Every eye socket became a heart, and in every heart she cut a keyhole, because she said the dead need somewhere to lock up their troubles. We dyed the paper in the back kitchen. The teal came from the chapel's old blue wash, the magenta from beetroot, the purple from elderberries Mrs Hadley boiled down, and the olive from a bucket of nettles that stank the whole street out. Roses went on the crowns. Maud had seen roses on a bus advert once and never got over it.

By the Thursday there were four of them, pinned in the front window where the frost could not get at them. Maud made a fifth out of plain brown paper, no colour at all, and pinned it on the step outside. When I asked what it was for, she said the men would be coming back up the hill from the bus at shift change, and somebody ought to be waiting for them with the keyholes already unlocked.