Traditional-style sugar skull tattoo with a red rose, grey leaves and a small diamond shape on the forearm.

Sugar skull and red rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded sugar skull with patterned eye sockets, a heart-shaped nose and flower motifs fills the lower right of the forearm. A red rose with grey leaves sits at the upper left, and a red ribbon runs down beside the skull. The black linework is bold, the shading is smooth, and the red ink stands out against the grey.

Traditional Forearm Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves Diamond Ribbon Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have pawned the ring twice now, and the pawnbroker on Front Street has stopped asking and started nodding. The diamond he hands back on the Thursday is no bigger than a barley grain, and cold in your palm. Tom would have laughed at the price, then cried, because that ring was bought with two shifts of overtime and a promise of a Blackpool week that never came.

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The Sunday after the funeral you walk up past the colliery wheel to the cemetery, carrying a shoebox of red crepe paper and a jar of paste. Your sister says the dead like their faces painted, the way they do it in Mexico, all sugar and bone and bright paper. You don't know about that. You know Tom took his tea sweet enough to stand a spoon in, and that his pit lamp always hung on the left of his cap.

You sit on the wet grass and build the skull from icing sugar and water, pressing the eye rings in with the blunt end of a hairpin, one petal at a time. A heart for the nose, because he never once said the word love and left it in the shape of things instead. The rose goes in the top corner, and the ribbon you tie to the headstone, knotted the way he taught you to tie a boot, double and tight.

By the time the light goes, the sugar has begun to crack in the drizzle. You leave the diamond on the stone anyway, a sliver of glass catching the last of the sky. Somebody will take it by morning, or the frost will, and you find you don't mind which. The walk home is long and wet, and you notice you haven't once felt the cold.