Traditional-style flash design of a skull with a red rose crown, orange earrings and a FRIDA banner over red roses.

Skull with flower crown and FRIDA banner

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A skull wears a crown of red roses over dark hair tied with an orange band, with orange round earrings hanging beside the jaw. A white banner printed with the word FRIDA in red and green letters sits across the lower face, above a cluster of red roses and green leaves. Bold black outlines and flat fills give it a classic flash sheet look on a plain white background.

Traditional Skull Rose Flower crown Banner Lettering Earring Leaves

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The roses had to come off the bush before the church bells rang for the first morning, because Abuela Frida said a rose cut after the bells forgets whose name it was grown for. I was nine that year and my hands were too small for the thorns, so I stripped leaves into a bucket while she counted stems out loud in the dark of the yard.

Keep reading

The skull was already on the kitchen table, a sugar thing she had moulded from egg white and pressed with a spoon, its eye sockets packed with black beans so it would look back at us. Her earrings were the round orange ones she only wore on feast days, and she hooked them on after she had tied her hair up with the ribbon, leaning close to the cracked mirror as though the glass might argue.

Tomás from the fruit stall came by at noon with a coil of white cloth, asking if he could borrow the kitchen scissors. He wanted a banner for his brother's grave, and he wanted the name printed in red and green like the flag on the post office, but his letters came out lopsided. Abuela took the pen from him, wiped her palm on her apron, and wrote the four letters herself, one pull each, without lifting until the ink ran dry at the foot of the last one.

We carried the roses to the cemetery in the wheelbarrow, and by dusk the cloth hung from the cross with the petals heaped beneath it like a spill of wine. Tomás asked why she had not made the skull look sad. She shrugged and said the dead had seen enough of sad, and what they wanted was a good argument about the weather. I still think of that when the wind lifts the banner and the letters seem to lean forward to listen.