Pastel illustration of a sugar skull with a pink bow, a flower on the forehead and heart-shaped eyes, on a cream background with pink flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel sugar skull with pink bow

Colour · Flash

A sugar skull drawn in outline with pink bow on top of the head, a pink flower with blue-green leaves on the forehead, and smaller flowers and scrolls around it. The eye sockets are black with pink petal-shaped rims and pink hearts at the centre, and the teeth are shown in a wide grin. Shading uses yellow, pink and orange tones on a cream background scattered with pink flower outlines.

Skull Sugar skull Bow Flower Rose Heart Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every November the boats stayed in harbour, and Ada Penhallow sat at the back of her aunt's bakery with a bowl of icing sugar and a jug of egg whites. Nobody in Porthgarrow asked why she made skulls for the drowned when the church only lit candles. They ordered them, she made them, and the pinks were always the same pinks.

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The one that came in spring was for Tom Kessel's girl, Lowenna, who had gone off the breakwater after a dare. Ada had never properly known her, but she knew the bow. Lowenna had worn a big pink one every day at school, starched stiff by her mother on Monday mornings. So the skull had to have a bow, and her mother wanted hearts in the sockets, the sort of pink hearts you drew on a slate before the rain came.

Ada piped petals around each eye until her wrists ached, then set the skull on the sill to dry while the sea went grey against the glass. Dorrie from the chandlers came in to ask if it was finished. Ada said it was. Dorrie said it looked cheerful, and Ada said that was the point of it.

On the Sunday the mother came for it. She turned the skull in her hands and laughed once, a short surprised sound. Then she carried it down to the wall at the end of the quay and set it facing the water, bow to the wind. "She'd have hated being sad about," she said. Ada wrapped the empty tray in tissue, and the petals on the cheeks had dried so pale they looked like something the sea had washed up and left.