Black ornamental sugar skull design with a cap, crossed bones and filigree swirls, drawn in solid black linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate sugar skull with crossbones

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sugar skull with a decorative cap sits above crossed bones, with flower-shaped eye sockets and a toothed grin. The design is built from dense black filigree, swirls and scrollwork, with solid black areas and fine white detailing. It is shown in black and white on a plain background, with the motif centred and evenly balanced.

Blackwork Skull Sugar skull Crossbones Flower Swirl Cap

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook's knife is still wet when the bosun comes down the companionway, and you do not look up from the onions. Four days out of Valparaíso the sugar in the tin has gone to a grey crust, and the marigolds you bought off a woman at the quay have wilted into the bread bag. Nobody else on the Calliope eats the bread, but you keep baking it anyway, because it is the only thing aboard that smells like someone's kitchen at home.

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Down in the galley the heat sits on your shoulders like a wet coat. The skull on the bulkhead is the one thing you keep dry. Somebody scratched a grin into the paint there years ago, and every watch since has added a curl to it with a nail or a coal, until the thing has a peaked cap, two crossed spoons, and eye holes filled with flowers that never quite look like flowers. You wipe the grease from its grinning mouth each morning with the corner of your apron. It is foolish. It is also the only thing you have ever been asked to keep.

The bosun wants to know if the biscuit will last to the Horn. You tell him it will last as long as the men do, which is a joke he does not laugh at. He leaves a coin on the table for the bread anyway, and you pretend not to see it.

That night you crumble the stale loaf into a tin pan and set it on the shelf beneath the skull, with a splash of rum and a pinch of the grey sugar, and you tell the dark what the day was like. The ship creaks. Somewhere forward a man laughs in his sleep. In the morning the pan is empty, and the cap on the wall looks, for the first time in weeks, almost pleased with itself.