Colour tattoo of a red rose and a sugar skull with teal and pink details on a person's thigh, beside denim shorts and a graffiti wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and sugar skull on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large red rose with dark green leaves and grey-shaded stems sits on the outer thigh, with a coloured sugar skull in teal, pink and orange above it and smaller grey vine or leaf linework around the rose. The shading is soft and the colours are saturated, set against bare skin, ripped denim shorts and a white top. The background is a colourful graffiti wall and a leopard-print garment is held at the side.

Neo-trad Thigh Rose Sugar skull Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shutter had to be dry by six, and Dilys had three tins left: a red so deep it went nearly black in the shadow of the lamp post, a teal she had bought for a boat she never got round to painting, and the thin orange the council had rejected for the railings. She mixed it on an old paint lid with a lolly stick and did not look at the clock above the bakery door.

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Rafe came round the corner with two paper cups of tea and a flask of something stronger tucked under his arm. He stood at the foot of the ladder and studied the rose, its petals rounded like a fist beginning to open, its stems dragged in a grey so pale it looked like pencil. 'You've put a face in the corner,' he said. She had. A small sugar skull in teal and pink grinned up from the leaves as if it had been waiting there all along.

The council man arrived at ten to six, earlier than promised, with a clipboard he never opened. He looked at the rose for a long time. Then he asked whether the skull was the one from the photographs taped inside the bakery window, the ones of Dilys's gran in her back garden with the marigolds. She said yes. He nodded and said the street had been grey since the bank closed, and he had signed off on worse.

When he had gone she climbed down, wiped the lid clean on her overalls, and watched the last light slide off the metal. The paint was still wet. A bead of red ran a finger's length down the grey and stopped, as though it had decided to stay a while.