Colourful traditional-style sugar skull tattoo with red roses on a woman's upper back, seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull and roses on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull with blue-eyed sockets, yellow and blue ornamental details and a patterned forehead sits centrally on the upper back, framed by two red roses with yellow and green leaves. Bold dark outlines define the skull and flowers, with swirling line accents spreading outwards. The tattoo is fully coloured in red, blue, yellow, green and black, and the composition is centred on the shoulder blades.

Traditional Back Sugar skull Skull Rose Flower Swirl Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I had the red tin open on the sill when Mrs Abernethy came up the lane with her boy, asking if I could make her husband's face bright enough to be recognised at the wake. The light was going over the beeches at the edge of Hollin Wood, so I sat her down and mixed the blue for the eyes while the boy hung about the gate.

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Nobody in Thornleigh painted skulls the way my grandmother had. She learned it from a sailor's widow who came over the moor with a box of saints and bright cloth, and she put flowers on every face she could: roses for the living who would keep the grave tidy, marigold yellow for the lanes that led home. I kept her pattern on the foreheads, the little spirals like bracken uncurling, and went over the jaw in black ink so the bones would hold.

The boy sat on the stool with his hands in his lap and watched the roses come up beside the skull, red as the cherries on the Abernethy wall. He asked whether the dead could see colours. I said I didn't know, but the wood had shown me its own colours every autumn for sixty years, and I had never once asked it for permission.

When the last leaf was done I wiped the brush and blew on the blue until it dried. The lad stood and looked at the picture for a long time. Then he took a coin from his pocket, set it on the sill beside the empty tin, and walked back down the lane towards the trees, leaving the coin for the wood to take its share.