Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a woman wearing a rabbit-eared sugar skull mask and a teal bow, on the back of a calf.

Rabbit-eared sugar skull portrait on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A woman's face and shoulders are shown in profile, with her face partly covered by a sugar skull mask with rabbit ears, decorated with pink and red blotches and gold scrollwork. Her dark hair is styled in a pin-up roll, and she wears a teal bow and a green and gold ruffled collar. Bold black outlines sit beneath smooth colour shading, and the photo shows the tattoo on a leg in daylight beside grass and a floral trouser leg.

Neo-trad Calf Woman Rabbit Sugar skull Mask Bow Portrait Pin-up Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, come closer, you with the lamp and the sensible boots. No, the rabbit doesn't bite, not on a Tuesday. Mind the tent pole. That's Marisol's mask you're looking at, the one with the ears, and she wore it every night the Ferris wheel was lit over Brindle Market, which was every night for eleven summers until the council found a reason to close it.

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She had a rule about the mask. Paint it at dusk, with the gold scrolls first and the blotches last, and never once let anybody see her without it before the last bulb came on. The pink spots were bruises from a fall off a trapeze she never talked about, or so the stallholders said, and she let them say it. Her pin curls took two hours and a bottle of cold tea every morning. The teal bow was from her mother's wedding dress, cut down to fit a collar and nothing more.

One night in October the wheel stopped at the top with two gondolas full of schoolchildren screaming for joy, and the lights went out across the whole fairground at once. In the dark a voice called up from the midway, asking the girl with the rabbit ears to come down and tell them the time. She did. She told them it was twenty past nine, and that the wheel would start again in a minute, and that the mask had nothing to do with it.

That's the whole story, friends. The lights came back. The children came down laughing. Marisol went home to bed, and in the morning the wheel was gone, though nobody could say who had taken it apart. Now off you go, and watch the pole.