Six black and white line drawings of ornate sugar skulls with floral, rose and heart patterns on a mint green background, shown as tattoo flash designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six sugar skull designs on mint green

Black and grey · Flash

Six sugar skull designs are arranged in two rows of three on a plain mint green background. Each skull has bold outlines and fine ornamental linework filling the forehead, eye sockets and cheeks, with roses, flowers, hearts and scrolls. The drawings are in solid black ink on white with no shading or colour, and the layout is evenly spaced.

Skull Sugar skull Rose Flower Heart Scroll Floral ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marigold seller at the Thursday market in Ashby had a stall with a green awning that leaked at one corner, so every customer stood in the same wet patch. Her name was Marta Quill and she sold cut flowers in buckets and paper skulls in a basket, six for a shilling, painted with roses and hearts that she had cut from the same stencil for thirty years. Nobody bought the skulls in the rain. They bought them in November, for the dead, or for a dog that had gone under a lorry, or for nobody in particular.

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One grey morning a boy came along the row with his hood up and asked her what the skulls were for. She told him they were for remembering, and that the trick was to choose one with the right heart on its forehead, because the heart was the part that kept the name. He pointed at a skull with a rose on its brow and a keyhole where the eyes should be. She wrapped it in newspaper and would not take his coin, only asked him to bring the paper back full of whatever he had forgotten.

He came back the next Thursday with a folded sheet of the Ashby Gazette, empty of ink except for one thing: a pencilled list of names in a child's hand, crossed out one by one. Marta read it under the awning while the rain ran off the canvas in a rope. At the bottom, in smaller letters, was his own name, which he had not crossed out. She took the paper, pressed it flat under a bucket of chrysanthemums, and gave him back a skull with two new roses painted on its cheeks.