Black and cream drawing of a panda face styled as a sugar skull, with round ears, dotwork shading and floral ornament, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Panda sugar skull design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A panda head is drawn in the style of a Day of the Dead sugar skull, with round ears, a carved-looking nose and teeth, and ornate scrolls, dots and a rose across the forehead. The linework is bold and clean, with fine stippled shading along the edges of the cream-coloured face. The design is centred on a plain black background.

Dotwork Panda Sugar skull Skull Rose Scroll Dot Bear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bakers of Tlacotal stopped their spoons mid-stir when Pim came down the hill with his skull balanced on a tray of banana leaves. It was the first sugar skull anyone in the town had seen with round ears, and its face was so black-eyed and calm that old Inés crossed herself before she would touch it. Pim had only wanted to make something for the feast of the dead. Bears, he had decided, were not so different from skulls. Both sat very still, and both were mostly bone underneath anything nice.

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The mayor wanted a proper skull, the sort with a sugar rose and a nose like a carved door. Pim tried. He piped scrolls across the forehead until his paper cone ran dry, and he pressed petals into the wet icing, but every time he looked up the black patches were back, round and watchful, and his hands drew bamboo shoots beside the teeth. "It is a panda," said his niece Lupe, who was six and always right. "It is a panda that has been dead a long time and is very polite about it."

On the night of the feast the skulls were laid along the cemetery wall, each with a candle set in its open mouth. Children came with empty pockets and went home with them full of sugar. By midnight only Pim's skull was left, grinning its sweet grin at the moon. Nobody had the heart to eat it. Inés said it was too handsome. The mayor said it was bad luck. Lupe simply sat beside it and waited.

When the lanterns burned down, a real panda came up the hill, slow and black and white, and sat on the wall beside the skull as if they had arranged to meet. Nobody saw where it went. In the morning there was only a ring of crushed bamboo leaves and a sugar rose, gone from the forehead, though nobody could say whether it had been eaten or simply taken home.