Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a pink cupcake with a red gem, hearts and black skulls on the liner, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink cupcake with skull liners on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cupcake sits on the skin with swirled pink, purple and orange frosting, a red faceted gem on top and small purple hearts scattered across the icing. The paper liner is pink with black skulls and white dots along its base. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with soft shading and bright, saturated colour across the design.

Neo-trad Ribs Cupcake Frosting Gem Heart Skull Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Pyle has not forgiven me for the Year Nine bake sale, and she has come to the reunion carrying a lemon drizzle as if it might settle the matter. Standing by the trestle table in the sports hall, she lifted one of my cupcakes from its box with the care of someone defusing it. "Skulls on the liners," she said. "Mrs Okonedo would have had a fit."

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Mrs Okonedo had actually given me two tins of sponge and a bag of icing sugar the colour of a traffic cone. I had stayed up the night before piping purple swirls while my dad watched cricket with the sound off. The liners were the only thing I'd bought myself from the cash and carry on Dunstable Road: black skulls on pink paper, which the head of year called unsuitable and then bought six of for her niece.

The gem was the problem. It was a red boiled sweet I had lifted from the drama cupboard, a jewel Gerald Ashdown had been given after the Christmas play, which he swore on his mother was a real ruby. He had seen it on top of the cake that afternoon and gone quiet, with the look of a boy who had been let down by the world and was too polite to say so.

"You kept it," he said at the reunion, and I realised he meant the sweet, not the cake. I had kept it in an envelope for decades, which seemed absurd until he took it from my palm, bit it in half, sugar and all, and grinned as if we were eleven again and the sports hall was still ours to ruin.