Colourful sugar skull tattoo with a red rose above the eyes, on the top of a foot, in a traditional style with bold black outlines.

Sugar skull and rose on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull with a blue-grey head, yellow and orange flower-patterned eyes and a yellow-outlined jaw sits across the top of a foot. A red rose with green leaves and dots sits above the eyes, and thin script lettering runs along the outer edge of the foot. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour give the piece a traditional feel, and the foot fills most of the frame against a dark leather background.

Traditional Other Sugar skull Skull Rose Script Leaves Flower Dot Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the flats gets into an old man's ears and makes him say things he has not decided on. Pass me that cup. Now listen, because this is the one about Teodora and the sugar skulls. She drove a painted lorry north from Hermosillo every November with a crate of skulls strapped in the back, each one moulded from boiled sugar and dusted with blue paint, and each one meant for a grave she had never seen.

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Past the last filling station the road turned white and a tyre gave up under her. A boy came walking out of the heat carrying a tin of enamel and a brush worn down to three bristles. His name was Ruben, and he had been sent by the widow at the pump to fetch water, but he stood looking at her skulls as though they were the only sensible things for a hundred miles. He asked why the roses were red. Teodora said red is for the people who stayed and blue is for the ones who left. He painted a rose on the skull in her hand, quick and careless, and a bead of paint ran into the eye socket. She let it stay.

They changed the wheel together in the shade of the lorry while the sun softened the sugar at the edges. By dusk the skull on the dashboard had begun to weep a little golden syrup down its jaw. Ruben asked if she would come back this way. She told him the road always comes back on itself if you are patient, and that a dead thing painted well is never really lonely.

The lorry was sold for scrap long before the road was tarred. The skull, somehow whole, passed from hand to hand until a dressmaker in Tucson wrapped it in a scarf and never mentioned it again. Whoever holds it now will tell you it is only a dream, and they will be right, but the red outlasts the blue every time, and that is the part worth keeping.