Traditional style flash design of a red rose and a black ink sugar skull with green leaves and rainbow lines, drawn on a tan background with no body placement shown.

Sugar skull and rose design on tan background

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing a red-outlined rose on the left and a black-inked sugar skull on the right, with dotted and patterned detailing on the skull. Green leaves with hatched shading sit behind the rose, and curved rainbow lines fan across the top of a tan background. The linework is bold and even, with mixed red, green and black ink.

Traditional Rose Sugar skull Skull Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had the tin of red lead open on the cabin roof before the lock keeper had finished his cigarette, and she was mixing the green when Tomás came along the towpath carrying the dead man's brushes wrapped in a tea towel.

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The boat was called Second Wind, and it had belonged to Joe Harker for forty years. He'd left it to a granddaughter in Leeds who wanted nothing from it except what her letter asked for: the roses on the cabin side painted as they had always been, and on the back doors, a skull. 'Grandad liked the Mexican ones,' she'd written. 'The ones with the sugar on.' Nell had never painted a skull in her life. She knew roses, castles and the curled scrolls the old boatmen favoured, but nothing with a grin.

She drew it first in pencil on the board, then went over it in black. Each evening the sun slanted off the oily water and threw bands of colour across the cabin roof, and she caught herself copying them into the sky behind the rose, red and green fanning out like the arcs of a wheel. Tomás held the lamp steady. He said Joe had told him a skull was only a house with the lights left on for whoever came home.

On the last morning she signed the door panel small, beneath the skull's jaw. The boat slid out past the lock with the paint still tacky, the rose catching the first sun, and the skull grinning back at the water as though it had been expecting them all along.