Colour tattoo of a sugar skull with a red rose on top, on the back of a lower leg above a glittery high-heeled shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull and rose on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A bold sugar skull with a red rose crowning its head is tattooed on the lower leg, with dark outlines and filled areas of red, green, orange and pink. The shading is soft and the colour is saturated against pale skin. The leg is shown from the heel upward, with glittery silver and purple heels in the foreground and a blurred pavement behind.

Traditional Calf Sugar skull Skull Rose Leaves High heel Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had been sitting on the shelf since the first week of October, and Teodora had not once let anyone touch it. Her nephew wanted to sell it to a tourist from Leeds who kept asking about the red rose, but she only shook her head and wiped the sugar dust off its brow with the hem of her apron. The rose was her mother's rose. Every year her mother had pressed a red petal of icing into the forehead of the skull, a small crown, and every year the children had argued about which of them would get the one that bore it.

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This year nobody was arguing. The boys had gone north to work on the railways and the girls had married men from across the valley, and the house on the calle de los Pinos had grown so quiet that Teodora could hear the moths knocking at the bulb in the kitchen. On the night before the dead came home, she took the skull down, brushed it with a feather, and set it on the table beside a glass of mezcal and a plate of pan de muerto, the bread with the bone-shaped crust.

Before dawn the church bell began, and then the first knock came at the door. It was her youngest, Chuy, soaked from the bus, holding a paper bag of marigolds that had wilted on the road. He did not say he was sorry. He only looked at the skull, then at the rose, and said, 'You kept her green,' and Teodora laughed so hard she had to sit down on the step.

Then she took the brush from the jar, dipped it in the green, and began the leaves.