Colour Traditional-style sugar skull tattoo with red roses, a diamond and flowers on the lower leg, shown on a calf.

Sugar skull and roses on a calf

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A sugar skull with a patterned forehead, decorative swirls and a small diamond sits at the centre of the design, with three red roses and green leaves framing it. The black outlines are bold, with solid fills and soft shading in the roses and skull details. Red, pink, blue and green inks are used against the black linework, and the design sits vertically along a calf in a close, slightly angled photograph.

Traditional Other Sugar skull Skull Rose Diamond Flower Leaves Swirl Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every November the women of Calder Ford carried their dead out of the cupboards and set them on the kitchen tables, and every one of them was painted with sugar. Nobody in the town thought this odd except Ruth Abernethy, who had come up from the city in 1956 with a typewriter and a suitcase full of opinions. She said so at the post office, loudly, while Mrs Pell waited behind her with a tin of icing under one arm.

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Mrs Pell made her skulls from boiled sugar and egg white, pressing a pattern into the brow with the back of a teaspoon. For roses she used crepe paper dyed with beetroot and tea. This year she was making one for Albert, who had gone in the spring, and she wore his ring on a bootlace under her blouse. It was a small stone, bought from a pawnbroker in Dunmore in 1931 on a promise he never quite kept. She had told Ruth the story once, and Ruth had written it down, which Mrs Pell had not liked.

On the night before the feast, Ruth knocked on Mrs Pell's door with a tin of her own. Inside was a sugar skull, badly made, its roses lopsided, with a chip of diamond pressed into the forehead from a broken brooch. 'I didn't know what you'd want,' Ruth said. 'So I made you something you could laugh at.' Mrs Pell laughed, and then she stopped laughing, and the two of them sat up with the lamp until the roses had set.

In the morning the skull went on the windowsill beside Albert's, and the light came through the sugar so the chip of diamond threw small coins across the table. Ruth stayed through the winter. Every November after that she painted her own, and every year Mrs Pell pressed a rose onto its cheek and told her to hold still.