Black and grey pen drawing of an ornate sugar skull wreathed in flowers and leaves, a flash design suited to a fine line or botanical style.

Ornate sugar skull with flowers

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a skull decorated with scrollwork, dotted patterns and dark eye sockets, with a cluster of flowers and leaves across the top and along the left side. The linework is fine and built up with hatching and stippling to create shading on the bone and foliage. The image is rendered entirely in black ink on a pale background, with a simple, centred composition.

Fine line Botanical Skull Sugar skull Flower Leaves Scrollwork Dotwork

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the dahlias will not survive the frost, and you decide, out of spite more than hope, to lift the tubers before the ground goes hard. Mrs Okonedo's plot backs onto the railway at Ashford, and her shed still smells of creosote and the tobacco she gave up in 1989. She left you the key with a note taped to it: Don't let the bindweed win. Mind the skull on the bench.

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The skull is clay, pale as a bleached cup, its eye sockets rimmed with tiny dots like the ones she once pressed into a wedding cake. Ivy trails from its crown and a nasturtium has rooted in the gap of its jaw. You scrub the dotted rim with a wire brush and find a second key taped underneath, along with a name written in pencil: Teodor.

Teodor, it turns out, had the plot before her and died eleven years ago. You read his notes in the lean-to with your flask going cold. Stake the dahlias before noon. Pick the bay in the morning, when it is sweet. The skull likes the sun on its forehead. Every capital letter curls like a fern unrolling, and you start to think the two of them spent decades sending each other instructions across the same six feet of soil.

By dusk you have lifted nine tubers and set the skull in the sun with a fresh cutting of dark red dahlia pushed into its crown. You leave the second key on the windowsill with a note of your own. Next spring, you tell them both, I've kept it weeded.