Realistic colour tattoo of a sugar skull woman with red and grey roses, plus grey butterflies and leaves, running down a woman's ribs and side back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull and roses down the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A detailed sugar skull portrait with orange and white patterned face paint sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by red, pink and orange roses and grey-shaded leaves. Soft grey shading gives the butterflies and foliage depth, while the roses and skull use smooth colour blending. The design runs vertically along the side of the torso, with a small grey butterfly cluster at the top and roses at the bottom.

Realism Botanical Ribs Back Sugar skull Woman Rose Butterfly Leaves Skull Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar was always the hardest part, Orla's mother said, because it forgave nothing. In the kingdom of Vessary, every autumn before the bells for the dead, the sugar-makers boiled their batches in the lane behind the chapel and set the skulls to dry on boards in the sun. Orla had been given the faces that year, because her hands were steady and her uncle's had begun to shake.

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The orange paint went on first, in thin curling lines, then the white. She painted the skull for Maud Teague, who had kept the ferry at Low Mere for forty years and had asked, before she died, for a face with roses in its hair. Orla did the roses in red, then pink, then a deep rust where the petals folded. When the board was carried up to the chapel steps, the ferrywoman's sister came down the lane in a grey shawl, looked at the painted face for a long while, and asked who had given it roses.

Orla said nobody had. The sister said that was a lie, because the roses were the exact shade of the bush that grew over the ferry gate, and nobody had cut them since the summer. Orla went home that night and found four red roses standing in a jar on her windowsill. She had not filled the jar. The petals were warm, as though someone had just carried them in from the cold.

In the morning she took the best skull from the drying shelf, painted it with grey and pale butterflies, and carried it down to the ferry gate. By noon the butterflies had lifted off the board and gone over the reeds. Nobody in Vessary ever asked her where the roses came from again.