Black and grey realism sugar skull tattoo with a woman's face and roses on an upper arm.

Sugar skull and roses on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sugar skull portrait of a woman's face fills most of the upper arm, with lace-edged eye sockets, a hatched lower jaw and scrolling line ornaments on the cheeks. Two shaded roses sit above and below the face, with leafy filler and wispy scrollwork around the edges. The piece uses soft grey shading and fine dark outlines with no colour ink, and the design is shown tightly cropped along the length of the arm.

Realism Upper arm Sugar skull Skull Woman Face Rose Scrollwork Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mija, the roses at the shrine by mile marker forty are dead again, so I have been carrying water out there every morning in the Cutlass with the bad fan. Don't laugh. Your grandfather did it for thirty years for the boy who went under the grain truck, and I promised him I would keep it up, even if that promise is the only thing he left me that didn't rust.

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The road past Caliche Wells is nothing but dust and wire fence, and every time the wind comes off the flats it lifts the paper from the offering box and sends it chasing the car like a pack of white dogs. Last Thursday I caught one under my wiper. It was a sugar skull drawn in pencil, with a lace collar at the eyes and two roses pressed into the cheeks. Someone had written underneath in careful capitals: TELL HIM THE SHOP IS CLOSED. I kept it. I thought you would know whose hand that was.

I went to the Sánchez place on Sunday to ask. Teresa Sánchez held the paper a long time under the porch light and then said the lace was wrong. The old women, she said, cut the lace so the dead could look out at the living through it, and nobody ever drew it closed. Then she folded the paper into her apron pocket and would not give it back to me, and she would not tell me whose hand it was either.

So I am writing because you have the good handwriting, and because you are the only one who will drive out there with me on Saturday. Bring the bucket and the sharp scissors. We will cut the dead roses off the cross, put the new ones in, and if the wind takes another drawing across the road, let it go.