Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of a sugar skull with roses on the side of a torso, with a navel piercing visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull and roses on side and hip

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A sugar skull decorated with flowers and a heart motif wraps along the left side of the torso, with a grey rose above it. Further roses with leaves sit lower on the hip, shaded in soft greys with bold outlines. The tattoos are all in black and grey ink, set against bare skin and a dark grey fabric draped across the right side of the frame.

Traditional Ribs Sugar skull Rose Flower Heart Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your great-uncle never bought a single rose from the florist on Bridge Street, mind you. He grew them up the back wall where the coal dust settled thickest, and he swore the black spots on the petals were the valley showing off its manners. So when the Cwm Hafod pit shut in the spring of 1985, the women of the terraces didn't know what to do with their hands, and Nessa Price decided hers would make skulls.

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She had a sack of icing sugar in the pantry, saved since Christmas for a christening that never happened, and a tin mould her sister had brought back from Almería. She whisked egg white until her arm ached, pressed the sugar into a grinning head, then piped roses into the eye sockets and a little heart where the nose should be. Nobody on our street had ever seen the dead honoured that way, and nobody called it foolish.

Our Dafydd, nine years old and pale as candle wax, asked her who each one was for. She told him the sugar was for the living, to sweeten the bitter, and the icing was for the men who would never go down the shaft again. Then she set them along the windowsill in a row, grey with the day's rain, and let him take one. He bit the heart off first and said it was the only soft thing in the house.

By the new year the sill was bare and the street smelled of sugar and wet slate. I still have the mould in my kitchen drawer, rusted at one corner. Nessa never made another. She said the valley had its skulls now, and it did not need them sweetened twice.