Black and grey realism back piece showing a skeleton skull and a woman with sugar skull make-up and a rose in her hair, with coloured roses on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton and sugar skull back piece

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a grinning skull and skeletal hand beside a woman with sugar skull make-up, a rose in her hair and her eyes closed. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey wisps in the background and a sharp black outline around the skull. Colour roses on the upper arms contrast with the greyscale back.

Realism Back Upper arm Skull Skeleton Sugar skull Woman Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses along Mrs Ancell's garden wall had been pruned hard in March, and by June they were throwing canes as long as my arm. I was up the stepladder with the secateurs when Iris came out of the back door carrying a tray of sugar skulls, still cool from the mould, and asked whether I thought the dead had any use for pink icing.

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She had been baking them since Tuesday for the supper she held every November, though it was only June and she said she was practising. Her late husband Teodoro had taught her to press the sugar into the mould with the heel of her hand, so the eye sockets stayed sharp. Her fingers were always faintly white with flour. She set one skull on the wall beside me, its jaw grinning, a red rose painted on its brow, and said her mother had insisted on roses because a skull with no flowers looked like it had given up.

In October the wind came up the valley and stripped the last of the blooms. On the first of November I found a skull on the flagstones by the gate, wrapped in a page torn from a seed catalogue, with a single white rose cutting pushed into the place where the flower had been painted. Iris was at the sink when I carried it in, and she did not turn round. She only said that Teodoro had always liked to be remembered with something green, and that I should put it in water.

That evening I dug the cutting into the bed under the wall, where the old roses had grown, and firmed the soil with my boot. The skull I left on the windowsill to dry in the dark, its painted rose facing the garden.