Drawing of a tattoo design showing two stacked skulls with sugar skull forehead ornaments, swirling smoke lines and red roses, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked sugar skulls with red roses

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

The design shows two skulls stacked vertically, each with a decorative ornament on the forehead in the style of a sugar skull. Shaded grey linework gives the skulls volume, and wispy swirling lines run between and around them. Three red roses with dark green leaves are placed at the top, middle right and bottom, adding the only strong colour against the white background.

Neo-trad Skull Sugar skull Rose Smoke Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp before Old Tobias knocks it over with his elbow. Yes, that one. The fleet came in short that October, eleven boats where there should have been fourteen, and the harbour women went up the cliff path every evening with their arms full of red roses from the walled garden at Scarrow House, because the old squire's wife had planted them for the dead, and nobody had told her the dead had stopped wanting them.

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Now Jem Harrow had a skiff called the Marigold and a sister named Nell who kept two skulls on her windowsill. Not real ones, mind. Sugar things, moulded from the boiled white stuff her grandmother made at Michaelmas, with paper-thin brows piped in silver icing. She said they were for keeping watch. Jem laughed at her for it until the night the weather turned and he was out past the bar with the nets half-hauled and no sight of the light.

He told the rest of us afterwards that smoke came off the water like thread being pulled from a spool, curling round the hull and wrapping the oars, and that somewhere in it two pale faces turned to look at him, quite calm, the way a pair of sisters look up from their sewing when a door bangs. Then the smoke parted and the Marigold's bow pointed straight at the harbour mouth, true as a compass needle.

Jem came ashore with a rose stuck through his buttonhole and never once said thank you to the sea. He just took Nell's hand and walked her up the path, and the two of them left the white skulls exactly where they were, facing the water.